Authenticating with TFS Connect and TFS Dashboard

In this blog post, I’ll discuss how to login to – TFS Connect and TFS Dashboard written for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 respectively. The instructions are the same for the both the apps. The apps can be downloaded from here. The TFS Dashboard app is also available in the Windows store.

When you run the TFS Dashboard app for the first time, a login page appears:

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and similarly for the TFS Connect phone app:

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Team Foundation Service authentication:

In order to authenticate with Team Foundation Service, you will need to enable and configure basic auth credentials for your user profile on tfs.visualstudio.com:

 

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  • Select the Credentials tab
  • Click the 'Enable alternate credentials and set password' link
  • Enter a password. It is suggested that you choose a unique password here (not associated with any other accounts)

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  • Click Save Changes

 

Next, run the sample app and on the Login page, for the Domain field, the domain is from domain.visualstudio.com, Username is from the Credentials tab under My Profile, and Password is the password that you just created. The Service Endpoint is https://tfsodata.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/ .

 

Using an on-premises Team Foundation Server:

You will need to first install and configure the OData Service for Team Foundation Server v2 to expose an OData endpoint for your Team Foundation Server instance.

For the Domain field, you would enter the workgroup or domain of your Team Foundation Server.

Username will be the username you use to login to Team Foundation Server

Password is the password you use to login to Team Foundation Server

Service Endpoint is the OData Service endpoint address that you have used to host the OData Service. For example something similar to:

https://<name of the server where OData service is hosted>:<portnumber>/<Defaultcollection or Name of Collection>/

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You can also try to connect to the OData service via IE to test out your credentials.

In the above screenshot, the address in the web browser is my OData Service endpoint i.e. https://localhost:10042/FabrikamFiberCollection/ . My credentials are the TFS credentials, so Domain is ‘vsalm’, Username is ‘admin’ and Password is the password used to login into Team Foundation Server.

By default, the OData Service is setup in a manner that a HTTP endpoint will throw an error. For testing purposes you can change this by setting ‘Transport’ to ‘None’ in web.config of ODataTFS.Web project:

<security mode="None"></security>

If you are using a HTTPS endpoint make sure that the certificate is recognized as a valid certificate by the machine that is running the app. The certificate should be placed into the machine-wide Trusted Root Certification Authorities store. For information on configuring certificates on a machine, please go through the ReadMe document of the OData Service.

After successfully logging in, your apps should resemble the following screens.

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AfterLoginPage