Bringing OData to Team Foundation Service

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I am pleased to announce that starting today we are enabling OData access for Team Foundation Service. The goal of the Team Foundation Service OData API is to help developers build applications for multiple device types (such as smartphones and tablets) and operating systems which interact with projects on Team Foundation Service. OData (https://www.odata.org) provides a great solution for this goal, and has been embraced by numerous developers for building great device-specific applications. OData is accessible from any device and application stack which supports HTTP requests.

You can get started at https://tfsodata.visualstudio.com/ which includes information on how to enable basic auth credentials for your Team Foundation Service account along with API documentation.

A sample Windows Store application is also available for download. This sample is licensed as MS-PL and we encourage you to learn from it and build upon it if you would like to build your own Windows Store application which works with Team Foundation Service.

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As of today this service is a beta. We are looking for feedback from the development community as we continue to refine this service offering. Please email TFSOData@Microsoft.com with your suggestions and bug reports. We know that performance for the service is an area we need to continue to invest in, especially for very large projects. If you have any specific feedback related to slow requests you are experiencing please provide us with details so that we can continue to make improvements here.

The Team Foundation Service OData API builds upon the work we have done to provide an OData Service which can be used with Team Foundation Server. If you are running Team Foundation Server on-premises and you would like to enable an OData endpoint for your server, please check out the OData Service for Team Foundation Server v2. Whenever possible we will keep the API structure identical between these two projects so that the applications you build will work regardless of whether you are using Team Foundation Server or Team Foundation Service.

We are excited to hear from anyone who publishes an application which works with the service. How are you using it? Where can we download it and can we advertise it to others?

Enjoy!