GitHub Copilot (GC) uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enhance its capabilities by allowing it to interact with external tools and data sources inside IDE in agent mode.
Popular MCP servers and use case
- GitHub MCP: Managing issues, PRs, and repo files
- Azure MCP: Manages Azure cloud resources and services for scalable infrastructure and secure data operations.
- Git MCP: Handles Git repository operations like commits, branches, and diffs for version control and codebase analysis.
We can setup our own MCP servers, in forms of executable, node module, docker image, and Web Api.
- Executable, node module and docker image will be running locally
- Web Api we can either host locally or remotely
Limitation
Works with any desktop agent only which will have human intervention to trigger.
How to Setup?
Get available MCP servers or create own. For me i am using available MCP for SQL Server.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/introducing-mssql-mcp-server/
Clone the repo https://github.com/Azure-Samples/SQL-AI-samples/tree/main/MssqlMcp
And build the solution in VS.
Now Open VS code and press Ctrl+Shift+P
Search MCP: Open User Configuration
Append the configuration
"MSSQL-MCP": {
"type": "stdio",
"command": "D:\\MssqlMcp\\dotnet\\MssqlMcp\\bin\\Debug\\net8.0\\MssqlMcp.exe",
"env": {
"CONNECTION_STRING": "Server=xxxxx;Database=Rtest;Trusted_Connection=True;TrustServerCertificate=True"
}
},
Save the configuration and click on START.
Once server is running, use GC and provide the command like "List all the procedure from #MSSQL-MCP"