After doing these courses, I feel confident creating professional visualizations and dashboards
Shoebur RahmanProcurement Specialist, Giz Bangladesh
Course Description
You've built an MCP server that exposes a few tools - now it's time to make it behave like the ones running in production. Advanced MCP is where servers delegate work to clients, report on what they're doing, respect filesystem boundaries, and talk to clients across very different transports.
Master Core MCP Features
Start with sampling, which lets a server hand a prompt back to the client's language model instead of holding its own API key. Then stream log and progress notifications so learners watching a 30-second tool call can see it working, and use roots to define exactly which files and folders a server is allowed to touch - a boundary the SDK leaves you to enforce yourself.Understand How Clients and Servers Talk
Go to the wire level and see what actually crosses the connection. You'll hand-write JSON-RPC requests and notifications, tell the two apart by their id field, and follow the initialization handshake message by message.Compare the STDIO and StreamableHTTP Transports
Learn why a STDIO server only works on one machine, how the StreamableHTTP transport uses a long-lived Server-Sent Events stream to push messages back to the client, and what the stateless_http and json_response flags trade away. By the end, you'll know which transport fits a local tool versus a remote, load-balanced deployment - and why.Feels like what you want to learn?
Start Course for FreeWhat you'll learn
- Determine how to use sampling so an MCP server can delegate language-model calls to the connected client instead of holding its own API key.
- Differentiate log notifications from progress notifications, and recognize when a long-running tool should send each.
- Identify how roots define the filesystem boundaries a server may access, and why the server must enforce them itself.
- Differentiate MCP requests from one-way notifications by their JSON-RPC structure, and order the messages of the initialization handshake.
- Assess when to use the STDIO versus the StreamableHTTP transport, and evaluate how the stateless_http and json_response flags affect server-to-client features.
Prerequisites
Curriculum
Course outline
1
Core MCP features
Discover the advanced features that separate a toy MCP server from a production one. You'll use sampling to borrow the client's language model, stream log and progress notifications from a slow tool so users see it working, and enforce roots so a server only ever touches the files it was granted.
- Video: Let's get started!50 XP
- Video: Sampling50 XP
- Sampling50 XP
- Sampling walkthrough50 XP
- Delegate the summary with sampling100 XP
- Video: Log and progress notifications50 XP
- Log and progress notifications50 XP
- Notifications walkthrough50 XP
- Add progress and logs to a slow tool100 XP
- Video: Roots50 XP
- Roots50 XP
- Roots walkthrough50 XP
- Stop your tool from escaping its roots100 XP
- Read a file only if it's inside the roots100 XP
2
Transports and communication
Go to the wire level and see how MCP clients and servers actually talk. You'll hand-write JSON-RPC requests and notifications, trace the initialization handshake, and compare the STDIO transport for local servers with the StreamableHTTP transport for remote ones, including how Server-Sent Events and statelessness shape what each can do.
Model Context Protocol: Advanced Topics
Course
Complete
