A declarative agent with an MCP plugin – agents in Microsoft 365 (W7, lesson 7)

What you learn in this lesson

justify when a declarative agent is enough and when the agent with its own engine remains necessary (decision M-03)

describe the structure of the agent manifest and plugin manifest 2.4 with the runtime type `RemoteMCPServer`

weigh a fixed tool list against dynamic tool discovery and choose one for the Kladde with reasons

set up sign-in with Microsoft Entra SSO and say what the MCP server has to change for it

use a test to prove that the plugin names only reading tools

The office wants to be able to ask in Copilot: "Which tenders are still open?" Nobody has to host an agent for that. A declarative agent uses Copilot's orchestrator and models and gets instructions and actions from you. Here the actions are the reading tools of Kladde.Mcp (lessons T8.1 "An MCP server in .NET" and T8.3 "Rights for tools"): find_contacts, list_appointments, list_open_tenders, get_day_rates. The tool book_appointment stays out.

State of the checks

Nothing in this lesson ran against a Microsoft 365 tenant or Copilot. Paths, fields and menus come from the Microsoft Learn pages under "Further reading", read while the lesson was written. Only PluginCheck with its tests (including those of Exercise 1) was built and run, in a trial project outside this repository with .NET 10, xunit and Shouldly; dotnet test ended with exit code 0. The manifests below are not checked against Microsoft's schema. Exercise 2 needs a test tenant, never a production tenant.

This lesson belongs to course W7

You will see the rest of this lesson and its video once you have bought the course. The goals above show what you learn here.

€79.00

incl. VAT, one-time payment

Access to all of the course's lessons with their exercises, solutions and videos on this site, for 24 months from the purchase. A self-study course: no tutoring, no exams or grading by us, and no certificate.

Withdraw from contract here

What you learn in this lesson

State of the checks

This lesson belongs to course W7

What comes next