Model Context Protocol: Advanced Topics

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.