Free Starter Pack — AI Agents & Small AI Apps

AI Agents & Small AI Apps — The Visual Studio Learn Starter Pack

Build your first AI agent, package its tools the standard way, and ship a complete PDF Q&A app — the three flagship Visual Studio Learn tutorials, distilled into one free PDF.

This pack is free for email subscribers. Subscribe to Visual Studio Learn — new tutorials every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, no spam — and the Starter Pack download is yours.

Subscribe free   Download the Starter Pack (PDF)

What you get

• Part 1 — The Agent Loop. An agent is a prompt, plus tools, plus a loop: Goal → Think → Act → Observe, explained round by round. The two tools (live weather, a calculator that refuses to be dangerous), the safety rule every agent builder needs — treat every tool argument as untrusted input — the real live run (Ottawa 9.4°C, Toronto 12.1°C, doubled difference 5.4), what one run actually costs, and the 4-errors checklist.
• Part 2 — MCP in Plain Terms. The wiring problem MCP solves, Host / Client / Server without the confusion, a tool as a typed function (the type hints are the schema), the server's actual live output — the "Database backup" note, returned from SQLite — and the key errors, including the FastMCP rename that breaks older tutorials.
• Part 3 — Small AI App #1: PDF Q&A. A complete app in one FastAPI file: upload → extract → chunk → retrieve → answer. Grounding enforced by code (no matching chunk, no model call), and the real cost per answer — 277 input tokens, 35 output, US$0.000339. Plus the full errors table: 422, 413, 400, 404, 500, 502, and the model-retirement 404.
• The run-everything checklist. One page with every version pinned exactly as the tutorials used them — Python, google-genai, the MCP SDK, FastAPI, pypdf — so the code you see is the code that runs.
• All the code, free. Every build lives in the companion repository, github.com/sajjad037/visual-studio-learn-code — one folder per tutorial.

Who this is for

Working developers who want the agent pattern without framework magic — Python developers meeting MCP for the first time, and anyone who'd rather see a real run's real numbers than another hype diagram.

Questions

Is it really free?
Yes. It's the subscriber gift for the Visual Studio Learn email list. Subscribe, get the pack, unsubscribe any time.

Do I need an API key or a paid account to follow along?
No paid account. Parts 1 and 3 use a Gemini API key from Google AI Studio — the free tier is enough and no card is needed; the checklist walks through getting it click by click. Part 2 (MCP) needs no key and no account at all.

Which versions does it use?
The exact pinned versions from the tutorials: Python 3.12, google-genai 1.35.0, MCP Python SDK 2.3.0, FastAPI 0.161.1, pypdf 6.21.2, and the model gemini-3.8-flash for the app. The pack flags the one naming change that matters — Google has closed gemini-2.5-flash to new keys — and what to do when you hit it.

Is the code included?
The pack prints the essential excerpts; the complete, tested code for all three builds is in the public companion repo, linked inside the PDF and above.

How is this different from the blog posts?
Same material, distilled: the pack is the fast path — the ideas, the diagrams, the live results, and the error checklists on 20 pages. The posts are the full builds, line by line, each with its video.

Start with the pack

New tutorials every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday — Python, FastAPI, Microsoft Azure, SQL Server, and AI agents. Watch on YouTube (@VisualStudioLearn), follow on Facebook, or start with the pack:

Subscribe free   Download the Starter Pack (PDF)