Microsoft launched an official ADO MCP Server! 🎉🎉🎉

[Tiberriver256]

• Announcement Blog Post
• Repository

Wanted to share some initial thoughts:

Awesome!

I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the popularity of this server. A lot of people have helped me out, but I love the idea of Microsoft pushing this way faster than I could.

Do I deprecate this?

Seems like they are behind this project in some areas... Seems like it would be best to table this thing and contribute to theirs to pull all our forces around one central effort.

Opportunity to explore

Their approach seems pretty much the same as the approach I took with this server. Use MCP as an API wrapper. This project proved to me two things in that regard:

1. You can get pretty far with that very quickly
2. You also blow out context windows pretty quick that way

Is there a better way? 🤔 Maybe this frees me up to pivot this into experimental ways of designing MCP interactions. I feel like it may be better to think about it being closer to UI design. Hide all the API complexity and expose very specific fields/context windows/data/etc. for very specific use-cases.

[Ivana-DS]

How can I run this in cursor?

[Tiberriver256]

👋 Hi @Ivana-DS,

Are you asking about my MCP server? or the Microsoft one?

[Ivana-DS]

Hi @Tiberriver256,

the one from Microsoft, I would like to try it in Cursor, but I am not sure if this is posible. Your MCP is running well in Cursor, but only with the pat authenthification.

[Tiberriver256]

Ah, I see your question over there.

[MaxCollo]

@Ivana-DS about the one from Microsoft, it runs in Cursor but requires a az login ran by you or ran directly by a Cursor agent in a chat.
This is an exemple of what I used :

"azure-devops": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@azure-devops/mcp",
        "<put-your-organization-here>"
      ]
    }

Remember to change the last arg by your own ADO organization 😄

[MaxCollo]

Hello @Tiberriver256,

I totally understand you thoughts and the consequences of maintaining such a MCP server.
Thanks for those efforts for the community 😄

The Microsoft MCP is only usable via az login and that is a red flag when the goal is to run it on a container.
For now, this MCP is the most viable and I hope that whichever direction it will take, we can find the best of all worlds !

Have a nice weekend

[Tiberriver256]

Hello 👋,

Thanks for engaging in the discussion!

I think that might just be poor documentation on their part. They use Azure Identity and DefaultCredential, the same as I do in this package.

I've dropped an issue in their repo to update the docs for clarification:
microsoft/azure-devops-mcp#187

[DavidNorena]

i think supporting the Microsoft version would be a good idea, you can put all the good effort you put here there, and is a win win for everyone

That is my humble opinion.

On the other hand even when Microsoft version says it only works with az login is not totally true just setup environment variables to be like below:

ADO_MCP_AZURE_TOKEN_CREDENTIALS=prod

and then @azure/identity sdk for javascript has a chain that takes the following approach for authentication (when you use prod)

environmentcredentials, workloadidentitycredentials, and managedidentity credentials.

so if you combine ADO_MCP_AZURE_TOKEN_CREDENTIALS=prod with this

AZURE_CLIENT_ID="xxxxx"
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET="xxxxx"
AZURE_TENANT_ID="xxxxx"

you authenticate using a principal :) (just create the principal in your entra id, allow the user to the project where you want it to be working automated and that is all)

Note:

I added support for HTTP transport, in order to make more complex use cases / automation of this code

https://github.com/DavidNorena/azure-devops-mcp/tree/feat/add_http_transport

@Tiberriver256 will appreciate your review or comments on that implementation for http transport and docker support thanks