Powershell for working with AzureDevOps Web Hooks

Recently, I was working with the AzureDevOps Web Hooks infrastructure and I really enjoyed the tooling that they had provided. In particular, I liked the interface they provide which shows:

• The number of successful and failed requests sent to a web hook/service,
• The history of those requests,
• And the details of what was actually sent and received (the payloads)

This visibility provided by the tooling was tremendously helpful in developing, debugging and monitoring.

There’s also a fair amount of documentation put together by the AzureDevOps team to make using these services easier.

• Integrate with service hooks
• Create a service hooks subscription programmatically
• Web Hooks
• .NET Client Libraries for Azure DevOps and TFS
• Azure DevOps Services REST API Reference

However, I have two gripes about the documentation.

• It took me a while to find the documentation because I didn’t know the exact search terms to look for. A generalized search for “azuredevops api .net client” will land you in the “Integrate Application” area of the documentation, rather than the desired “Service hooks” area.
• When it got down to the details of which libraries to use and how to use them, the documentation became a bit thin. For example, the AzureDevOps website has a really cool piece of functionality where they hide the “git” event types when the project has no git repositories within it. So, I was thinking about “querying the possible input values” on a particular project to see if the response limited the values similarly. To do that, I originally looked in the .NET API browser for a ServiceHooks*HttpClient object. But, that doesn’t exist. So, I looked at the Publishers – Query Input Values api from the REST documentation. And, the first property I should put in the request body is “currentValues”, which is of type object (what are the details on that?), and has no description given. If I’m trying to query for the current values, what should I put in for “currentValues” and in what format? It becomes apparent that the request and response are using the same object, and that property is only used in the response. So you can ignore that property on the request. But, why doesn’t the documentation state that?

Enough with my tribulations, here’s the results:

• These are a set of functions for working with Web Hooks (even though it’s misnamed as ServiceHook).
• These Web Hooks are created for the very specific needs that I wanted. Which were to create Web Hook integrations with a webservice I built for analyzing code commits, pull requests, and builds.
• The powershell is a wrapper aroound the .NET Client library (nuget) Microsoft.VisualStudio.Service.ServiceHooks.WebApi version 15.131.1, which isn’t the latest version. Since it’s not the latest version of the library, that difference might account for the documentation on the .NET Client libraries not lining up with it. For example, the ServiceHooksPublisherHttpClient does not exist in the .NET API browser.