Azure DevOps is pretty sweet. Manage your code, backlog, sprints, builds – the whole caboodle. Also, it has a comprehensive REST API so you can access your data and integrate with DevOps from anywhere you like.

Ever since we started with DevOps (VSTS, TFS) we created some PowerShell scripts to integrate with it for Dynamics NAV development. They’ve become an indispensable part of a developer’s day.

(I’m going to refer to “Azure DevOps” as ADO from now on. I know ADO is an already familiar acronym in software development but I don’t want to type “Azure DevOps” every time and just referring to it as “DevOps” makes no sense. I’m not sure “Azure DevOps” makes much sense as a name anyway. Surely DevOps refers to the practice, not the tool you use to achieve it? Anyway…digression over.)

Authentication

The first thing you’re going to need to do is authenticate with your instance of ADO. You can create a Personal Access Token to authenticate your requests.

Sign in to your ADO instance, click on your profile (top right) and select Security from the menu.

Click “New Token” to create a new Personal Access Token. Give it a name, I’ll call mine “Azure Barbara” (only marginally sillier than “Azure DevOps”).

There are a bunch of “scopes” (25, at the time of writing) to which you can grant this token access. You can define which scopes an API call authorised with this token should have access to. For the sake of this example, I’ll choose “Full access”. Choose an expiration date for this key and hit Create.

Your token will be created and displayed. You need to copy this token somewhere safe. This is the only opportunity you will have to view the token. If you lose it you’ll need to create a new one.

Calling the API

Now that you’ve got an access token you can go ahead and call the API. The API is well documented here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/core/?view=azure-devops-rest-5.0

As a test, I’ll list the team projects in my instance. Open up PowerShell…

function Create-BasicAuthHeader {
  Param(
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
    [string]$Name,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
    [string]$PAT
)

  $Auth = '{0}:{1}' -f $Name, $PAT
  $Auth = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Auth)
  $Auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($Auth)
  $Header = @{Authorization=("Basic {0}" -f $Auth)} 
  $Header
}

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://dev.azure.com/<ADO organisation name>/_apis/projects' -Headers (Create-BasicAuthHeader 'Azure Barabara' '<personal access token>') -Method Get

Replace <ADO organisation name> with the name of your organisation in ADO. Also put your token name and value into the script in place of Barbara.

The Create-BasicAuthHeader function creates an authentication header which is passed by Invoke-WebRequest. If all is well you’ll get some JSON back. Something like this. I’ve got one project in my ADO instance called “Hello World”.

{"count":1,"value":[{"id":"<GUID>","name":"Hello World","url":"https://dev.azure.com/<my ADO instance>/_apis/projects/<project GUID>","state":"wellFormed","revision":471004199,"visibility":"private","lastUpdateTime":"2019-02-28T16:21:42.417Z"}]}

Nice. Next time we can set about something that is actually useful. To whet your appetite, these are some of the things that we use it for.

• Finding the latest successful build for a given project and Git repo and downloading the build artefacts (the .app files that were created)
• Reading a given file from a given project and Git repo – we use it to find app.json to download dependency apps recursively in the build process (more on that later)
• Retrieving CAL objects that were modified by a given changeset #
• Creating work items, iterations and other ADO entities