LINQ to Azure DevOps Data

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Azure DevOps via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Azure DevOps. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Azure DevOps Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can connect to your Azure DevOps account by providing the Organization and PersonalAccessToken.

   Obtaining a Personal Access Token

   A PersonalAccessToken is necessary for account authentication.

   To generate one, log in to your Azure DevOps Organization account and navigate to Profile -> Personal Access Tokens -> New Token. The generated token will be displayed.

   If you wish to authenticate to Azure DevOps using OAuth refer to the online Help documentation for an authentication guide.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   AuthScheme=Basic;Organization=MyAzureDevOpsOrganization;ProjectId=MyProjectId;PersonalAccessToken=MyPAT;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;

👁 Required connection properties for the data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting AzureDevOpsEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select commands. For example:

AzureDevOpsEntities context = new AzureDevOpsEntities();

var buildsQuery = from builds in context.Builds
 select builds;

foreach (var result in buildsQuery) {
 Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Id);
}

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.