Visual Studio Code bolsters MCP support

Visual Studio Code 1.101, aka the May 2025 version of Microsoft’s popular code editor, expands support for the Model Context Protocol, a technology that standardizes how applications provide context to large language models.

VS Code 1.101 was released June 12. Downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

With the new release, VS Code has expanded its support for MCP-enabled agent coding capabilities with support for prompts, resources, sampling, and authenticating with MCP servers. Prompts, which can be defined by MCP servers to generate reusable snippets or tasks for the language model, are accessible as slash commands in chat. Developers can enter plain text or include command output in prompt variables.

With VS Code’s MCP resource support, which includes support for resource templates, resources returned from MCP tool calls become available to the model, can be saved in chat, and can be attached as context via the Add Context button in chat. Developers can browse resources across MCP servers, or for a specific server, by using the MCP: Browse Resources command, or using the MCP: List Servers command.

VS Code 1.101 offers experimental support for sampling, which allows MCP servers to make requests back to the model, and now supports MCP servers that require authentication, enabling interaction with an MCP server that operates on behalf of a user account for that service. Developers now can enable development mode to debug MCP servers by adding a dev key to the server config.

Finally, new MCP extension APIs enable extensions to publish collections of MCP servers. This means VS Code extension authors can bundle MCP servers with their extensions or build extensions that dynamically discover MCP servers from other sources.

Other new features and improvements in VS Code 1.101:

Developers now can define tool sets to use in chat, either through a proposed API or through the UI. Tool sets make it easier to group related tools together, and quickly enable or disable them in agent mode, Microsoft said.

Selecting a history item in the Source Control Graph now reveals the resource for that item. Developers can choose between a tree view or list view representation from the... menu.

Language server completions now are available in the terminal for interactive Python REPL sessions.

Task runoptions now has an InstancePolicy property that determines what happens when a task reaches its Instancelimit.