.NET client libraries

TFS 2018

Client libraries are available for .NET developers who build Windows apps and services that integrate with Azure DevOps. Client libraries integrate with work item tracking, version control, build, and other services. These packages replace the traditional TFS Client OM installer and make it easy to acquire and redistribute the libraries needed by your app or service.

Dependency diagram

Features

• Downloadable from NuGet.org and easily importable into your Visual Studio projects
• Libraries are licensed for redistribution in your apps and services (view the license)
• Access both traditional client object model APIs and REST APIs

Package and Azure DevOps version-mapping table

For the latest preview versions, see the NuGet packages gallery.

REST packages

Soap package

Install

Install from a NuGet package manager command prompt:

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.TeamFoundationServer.ExtendedClient

Connect

To create an authenticated connection to Azure DevOps, get an HttpClient for the service you want to work with, and then call methods against that service.

See the following examples:

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.Common;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.SourceControl.WebApi;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.WebApi;

const String c_collectionUri = "https://dev.azure.com/fabrikam";
const String c_projectName = "MyGreatProject";
const String c_repoName = "MyRepo";

Uri orgUrl = new Uri(c_collectionUri);

// Connect to Azure DevOps Services
VssConnection connection = new VssConnection(orgUrl, new VssBasicCredential(string.Empty, personalAccessToken));

// Get a GitHttpClient to talk to the Git endpoints
using (GitHttpClient gitClient = connection.GetClient<GitHttpClient>())
{
    // Get data about a specific repository
    var repo = gitClient.GetRepositoryAsync(c_projectName, c_repoName).Result;
}

Authentication paths that produce an interactive dialog aren't available in the .NET Standard version of the .NET client libraries. When you're using the .NET Standard version, provide your credentials more explicitly to authenticate, like in the following example.

using System;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.SourceControl.WebApi;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.Common;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Services.WebApi;

namespace ConsoleApp1
{
    class Program
    {
        const string collectionUri = "https://dev.azure.com/fabrikam";
        const string projectName = "MyGreatProject";
        const string repoName = "MyRepo";
        const string pat = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var creds = new VssBasicCredential(string.Empty, pat);
            
            // Connect to Azure DevOps Services
            var connection = new VssConnection(new Uri(collectionUri), creds);
            
            // Get a GitHttpClient to talk to the Git endpoints
            using var gitClient = connection.GetClient<GitHttpClient>();
            
            // Get data about a specific repository
            var repo = gitClient.GetRepositoryAsync(projectName, repoName).Result;
        }
    }
}

For more authentication samples, see .NET Samples.

Reference

For more information and for up-to-date reference documentation, see the .NET API browser.

Samples

Check out samples on our .NET Samples Page or directly on our .NET GitHub Repo.

Known issues

Interactive authentication dialog doesn't appear when using the Azure DevOps OM in a Single Threaded Apartment (STA)

The interactive authentication dialog doesn't appear in cases where your code is running from a Single Threaded Apartment (STA). This issue can commonly occur from WPF applications. To work around this issue, you can change your initialization method to be async and request authentication as in the following example.

async void InitAzureDevOps()
{
    Uri _uri = new Uri("https://dev.azure.com/MyAccount/");

    var creds = new VssClientCredentials(new WindowsCredential(false),
                                         new VssFederatedCredential(false),
                                         CredentialPromptType.PromptIfNeeded);

    VssConnection vssConnection = new VssConnection(_uri, creds);
    await vssConnection.ConnectAsync();

    ...

}

Using NetStandard 2.0 versions of the Azure DevOps OM

For version 16.143.1 of our NuGet packages, we support NetStandard 2.0. These packages correlate with Azure DevOps Server 2019 RTW and are fully compatible with Azure DevOps.

Microsoft.TeamFoundationServer.ExtendedClient package doesn't have NetStandard support

The Microsoft.TeamFoundationServer.ExtendedClient doesn't support a NetStandard compliant version.