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Hands-on with MCP Resources in Visual Studio

In the first post of this series, we explored what MCP resources are and why they're the overlooked piece of the MCP puzzle. In a second post we showed how to use MCP resources in Visual Studio Code. Before I continue with a next post on building your own MCP server, I first want to show you how Visual Studio handles MCP resources.

Setting up your MCP server with resources in Visual Studio.

Let's start by installing an MCP server that provides resources. We'll use the GitHub MCP Server as our example because it's widely used and demonstrates several resource patterns.

We’ll use an mcp.json file to configure our mcp server:

  • Create .vscode/mcp.json in your workspace root
  • Add your server configuration:
  • Save the file—Visual Studio will detect it and try to load the MCP server.
  • If you now try to use this MCP server, you’ll notice that it doesn’t work yet.
  • This is because we first need to authenticate and fetch an OAUTH token.
  • Click on the … next to the MCP server and click on the Authentication option
  • On the Authentication popup, click on Authenticate.

Using MCP resources

Once you have an MCP server installed and running, let's explore its resources.

  • Click on the + icon in the chat menu and choose MCP resources:

 

  • Choose the MCP resource template you want to use and provide the necessary parameters
    • Remark: Notice that the path used in the Github MCP server is case sensitive!

 

  • Now our agent can use this resource in the same way as a local resource.

That’s it!

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