Ask for a whole metadata of MCP server tool in VS Code API (such as `vscode.lm.tools`)

[Alive-Fish]

We are developing an extension (ATK) and we want to list all metadata of MCP server tools. I have found vscode.lm.tools which contains all the started tools, but it just contains some fields without all fields of a tool in MCP server.

Is there any way to get whole metadata of tool or is it possible to contain them in LanguageModelToolInformation? Very thanks!

[SuryaMSFT]

Connor Peet (@connor4312) when can we expect this to land?

[connor4312]

We've no immediate plans to add this.

What's your use case for it?

[Alive-Fish]

Hi Connor Peet (@connor4312) , I have drafted a Pull Request #285882 for implementing it. Could you help to review it or give us some suggestions? We can make an internal discussion from Teams or Outlook, if needed. Thanks!

Cc. SuryaMSFT , Pierce Boggan (@pierceboggan) , Alice Wang (@wh-alice) , Yu Zhang (@summzhan)

[connor4312]

I'm still unclear on your use case for this, can you please explain more?

[Alive-Fish]

Yes, Connor Peet (@connor4312).

What does our extension do? Our extension provides experiences on developing Microsoft 365 agents, which contains the experiences for users to develop declarative agents on Microsoft 365.

What is the expected behavior? Declarative agents on Microsoft 365 have supported users to use tools of MCP servers. Our extension expects to automatically get the definitions of the tools and let users select what they want to use in the declarative agent. We find that vscode.lm.tools provides the definitions of them. That's more convenient for us, but it doesn't provide the full definitions of MCP tools. I thought it might be defined for language model tools before.

Why we need the full definitions? There is a strong ask from our partner team (SuryaMSFT) that full definitions will decide whether the OpenAI apps SDK can work well on declarative agents. If no full definitions, that feature is uncomplete.

Is there any other solution? Yes, but it is stranger if we implement an MCP host in our extension, because the authentication flow will be written by us and might be different with the flow of the MCP host in VS Code. Also, that needs a bigger effort.

We have a discussion with Pierce Boggan (@pierceboggan) and he said we can contribute it because you have tasks with the bigger priority. We can discuss more if you have more concerns. Thanks!

Cc. Alice Wang (@wh-alice) , Yu Zhang (@summzhan)