CrestApps.AgentSkills

CrestApps.AgentSkills provides a reusable MCP (Managed Content Prompt) skill engine for .NET applications together with Orchard Core integration. It enables you to expose a set of AI-powered skills defined in SKILL.md files and access them through a consistent MCP interface. The MCP engine itself is provided by CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp, while Orchard Core support is available via CrestApps.AgentSkills.OrchardCore and CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp.OrchardCore for runtime MCP prompts and content/resource provisioning. This setup allows you to plug in AI capabilities into any .NET app or Orchard Core project without writing custom parsers or providers, using a shared skill format and runtime primitives.

To use the MCP capabilities, install the appropriate NuGet packages into your project and register the MCP services. For generic MCP skill support in an app, reference CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp; for Orchard Core development workflows and runtime MCP features, use CrestApps.AgentSkills.OrchardCore and CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp.OrchardCore respectively. After installation, configure the MCP server in your startup code to load skills from the standard .agents/skills directory or a custom path, and ensure resources and prompts are provided via the built-in providers.

Prerequisites:

• .NET 10 SDK (or later)
• Basic familiarity with NuGet package installation and MSBuild/Predictable build output

1. Install the MCP engine package into your project:

   • CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp (generic MCP engine)
   • Optional: CrestApps.AgentSkills.OrchardCore (Orchard Core local AI authoring tooling)
   • Optional: CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp.OrchardCore (Orchard Core MCP runtime)

   Example (via dotnet CLI):

   • dotnet add package CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp
   • dotnet add package CrestApps.AgentSkills.OrchardCore
   • dotnet add package CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp.OrchardCore

2. Initialize MCP in your application (example): // In Program.cs or Startup.cs builder.Services.AddMcpServer(mcp => { mcp.AddAgentSkills(); // from CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp });

3. Build your project:

   • dotnet build -c Release

4. Run the server (via the methods supported by your host):

   • If using the provided mcp_config approach, run the MCP host as described in the project documentation or with your typical hosting setup.

5. Place skills in the standard folder structure (e.g., .agents/skills) or point the MCP engine to a custom path containing SKILL.md files following the agentskills.io specification.

Tips and common notes:

• Orchard Core integration copies skill files into a solution-wide .agents/ folder on first build after install/update. Copy behavior is limited to development-time tooling and does not run at runtime unless configured.
• No runtime dependency on the Orchard Core development tooling is required when using the generic MCP engine.
• Files copied by CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp.OrchardCore are placed under contentFiles/any/any/.agents/skills/orchardcore/ for MCP runtime usage.
• If you update the NuGet packages, skill files may be refreshed automatically for MCP runtime packaging. Avoid modifying generated files directly in .agents/ to prevent conflicts after updates.
• Ensure your environment is set up with .NET 10 SDK or newer and that your hosting environment allows reading skill files from the configured path.
• When using Orchard Core, the MCP runtime will register IMcpResourceFileStore, IMcpPromptProvider, and IMcpResourceProvider as singletons for efficiency.