TFS Webservice Documentation - python

We use a lot of of python to do much of our deployment and would be handy to connect to our TFS server to get information on iteration paths, tickets etc. I can see the webservice but unable to find any documentation. Just wondering if anyone knew of anything?

The web services are not documented by Microsoft as it is not an officially supported route to talk to TFS. The officially supported route is to use their .NET API.
In the case of your sort of application, the course of action I usually recommend is to create your own web service shim that lives on the TFS server (or another server) and uses their API to talk to the server but allows you to present the data in a nice way to your application.
Their object model simplifies the interactions a great deal (depending on what you want to do) and so it actually means less code over-all - but better tested and testable code and also you can work around things such as the NTLM auth used by the TFS web services.
Hope that helps,
Martin.

So, this question is friggin' old, but let me take a whack at it (since it keeps coming up in my google searches).
There's no officiall supported API for the on premise TFS (the MSFT hosted one has http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/integrate/api/overview).
That said, you can always use Fiddler (http://www.telerik.com/fiddler) or something like it to inspect the calls that the web client for TFS is making to the server and do your magic to turn those into the scripts in python you want.
You'll need to run your python scripts under a service account that has TFS privs appropriate to what it is trying to do (read, update, confugure... whatever).
Since it sounds like you are just trying to read from TFS, this might be a really easy way for you to get what you want since an HTTP get to
http://yourserver/tfs/yourcollection/yourproject/_workitems#id=yourworkitemid
will hand you back (halfway) sane html payloads.
If you want lists of iterations or teams or whatever, then your service account needs to have the appropriate admin privileges and hit things like
http://yourserver/tfs/yourcollection/yourproject/_admin/_iterations
and use that response.

Related

Expose Django from a C++ service

I'm writing a service (daemon) which provides web-unrelated features to my users.
I'd like to implement a minimal web server in that service such that a user can connect on say http://localhost:5000 and get an overview of the service current status. I've read a lot on embedding/extending Python and on how the latter seems to be recommended. However I can't decide how to design this: my service entry point has to be on the C++ side (it's a system daemon and one might not want to compile it with the web-server feature).
I'd like to use something like Django to be able to handle the requests (routing, security, whatever) on the Python side where many, many things already exist. I already have a minimal HTTP server in C++ (mongoose) that can process simple requests but I'd really like to delegate the actual processing to Python, pretty much the way WSGI does.
What is a good approach here ?

Delivering Python Processed data to the web

I have developed a python program that parses a webpage and creates a new text document with the parsed data. I want to deliver this new information to the web. I have no idea where to start with something like this. Are there any free options where I can have a site automatically call this python code upon request and update the new data to its page? Or is the only feasible solution here to have my own website/server that uses my code? I'm honestly pretty overwhelmed with many of the options when I try to begin doing a web-search for a solution like this. I have done a decent amount of application programming before so i'm confident in my ability to learn new things, but web protocols are all new to me so its hard to find a starting point.
Ultimately I want this python code to run automatically, or per request of a user, and deliver to the data to them. It could even be through an email, although that is probably less practical.
I personally have good experience using Google Appengine (and its free for a limited amount of requests). The downside is that it does not allow C-extensions or Python3.
If you want to host your own server, tornado is a good option I think. Tornado supports both Python2 and Python3.
There are a great deal of options available.. from 'traditional' virtual server or website hosts like a2hosting or godaddy to 'Cloud Application Hosts' such as Amazon EC2, Heroku or OpenShift.
For your case, and without knowing more, I would suggest that an application hosting is more appropriate, and that you should take a look at Heroku and Openshift in particular.
Define carefully what you want to achieve (how the users access your application, what they see, how they interact with it... etc..) and then evaluate these options based on those requirements.
Most offer a free trial, or even free services, depending on what you need! Good luck
If you've never worked with web technologies before this will be a overwhelming task, since there's a lot of different technologies involved, and many possible ways to combine them.
You'll probably want to start by familiarizing yourself with the very basics of the HTTP protocol.
Then you should read a bit on CGI server-side programming (the article also has a quick overview on HTTP).
Python can run both on CGI and WSGI (if the server provider allows such access), so you may also want to read about WSGI.
Once you grasp all these concepts, you should check this question for actual python techniques.
Also, since you seem to be under the impression you must pay to have a website/app deployed, you should know there are companies that host python apps for free

Build a TCP proxy on Google App Engine

I'm trying to figure out how to build a TCP proxy on GAE (Google App Engine). I would ordinarily do it using twisted networking engine but GAE doesn't allow frameworks. I'm also pretty new to internet and networking technologies in general.
Basically I have a proxy server and I'd like to use GAE as a TCP proxy to relay everything to the primary proxy server. All the GAE front ends are connected to the back end by google fiber, so if I make the back end near the primary proxy server, it should make it super fast regardless of where I'm connecting from.
Unfortunately GAE doesn't allow me to control ports at all and everything that I'm reading either tells me how to configure a TCP proxy on a server that I'm in complete control of or how to configure a proxy where I type the url into a webpage in the browser. Something along the lines of making a personal http://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/ type of website.
I'd like to set it up so I can simply tell chrome to ignore certificate errors (it connects to a dynamic IP using HTTPS so there's no way to sign it but I trust myself) and put the proxy info into chrome.
Edit: I'd prefer to write it in python but I can do any language
Thanks in advance
P.S. Please don't give answers like just use GoAgent or tor or something. They don't fulfill my purpose.
If you're simply trying to proxy HTTP requests like GoAgent does then have a look at the URLFetch documentation for Google App Engine.
URL Fetch Python API Overview
If you're trying to proxy anything else, then Daniel is correct.
This isn't the sort of thing you can use GAE for.
I don't know where you got the idea that GAE "doesn't allow frameworks". Of course it does, anything that speaks WSGI (eg Django, Flask, Pylons) is fine. But GAE is a web platform: it's not an appropriate place to try and write any sort of bare-metal networking platform. Apart from anything else, bandwidth on GAE is fairly expensive.
And also I don't know where you think the GAE "front ends" are, as opposed to the "back ends". GAE is not split that way, AFAIK.
I don't really understand what exactly you are trying to do, but it sounds like a content delivery network (CDN) like Akamai might be more appropriate.

GAE Python2.7 client authentication by certificate

I'm writing an application on GAE that is exposing a RESTlike API to a fixed number of remote servers which may be using any OS/software. At the moment I'm pondering how to identify and authenticate these remote servers painlessly.
I'm trying to avoid having to program too much of this myself for obvious security concerns.
If I'd were on an Apache or nginx I'd use SSL client certificates and let the clients choose whatever they want to contact the API, curl, webapp, whatever.
I understand that, at this time, GAE doesn't provide checking client certificates this way.
Is there any other way to do this in GAE with Py2.7?
If this is not possible or a very big hassle, can anyone point me to another good way to identify and authenticate remote servers in a situation like this?
I can only post two links of what I checked
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/google-appengine-python/c5PHMrAMAcI
https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/authenticate-google-app-engine-app
plus much more over the last few days. I found some questions which are similar to mine, but none with a satisfying answer, to me at least.
I'd suggest looking into Google Cloud Endpoints, which is currently in the trusted tester phase. I discuss it in more detail in this answer, but the main things you'll get are:
An easy way to define your API
Automatic support for OAuth 2
We're primarily targeting developers building APIs in their application backends, but other "same party" (e.g. you're the API developer and consumer) uses should work equally well.

What tracking solutions are available for server side code?

I'm working on a tracking proxy (for want of a better term) written in Python. It's a simple http (wsgi) application that will run on one (maybe more) server and accepts event data from a desktop client. This service would then forward the tracking data on to some actual tracking platform (DeskMetrics, MixPanel, Google Analytics) so that we don't have to deal with the slicing and dicing of data.
The reason for this implementation is that it's much easier and faster to make changes to a server process that we control rather than having to ensure every client in the wild gets updated if the tracking backend changes in some way.
I've been looking up info on the various options and I was hoping somebody here would have some good advice from their own experiences. Ideally we'd be able to use Google Analytics as it's free for any amount of usage but paid options are fine.
My only real requirement is either a good Python library or a well documented api that I can write a wrapper for (this seems somewhat lacking in GA when it comes to triggering events through any method other than their js or other provided libs).
N.B. We're not really tracking server code so something like NewRelic isn't appropriate, we're just decoupling a desktop application from the specifics of the tracking backend.
We ran into this same problem a bunch of times, we ended up building a suite of server-side analytics libraries to make this easier.
Segment.io has libraries for Python, Ruby, Java, Node, .NET and PHP that abstract the APIs for Mixpanel, KISSmetrics, Google Analytics and a bunch of other analytics services.
You could integrate the Python library once, and then send your data wherever you want. The data is proxied through Segment.io's hosted service. Hopefully this cleans up the mess of integrating a bunch of libraries, each with slightly different APIs. (The service is free for the first million events.)
Have you tried anything below?
The Google Data APIs Python Client Library has source specific to analytics
http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/
http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/source/browse/#hg%2Fsamples%2Fanalytics
https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/python_client_lib
You might be able to borrow from these sources as well;
Google has something they are working on for mobile and source is available in PHP, JSP, ASP.net and Perl: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/other/mobileWebsites
I also came accross this in PHP http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/
As for others:
KissMetrics: http://support.kissmetrics.com/apis/python
MixPanel: https://mixpanel.com/docs/integration-libraries/python
DeskMetrics: don't seem to have python, http://docs.deskmetrics.com/index.html
Sorry I cannot provide information based off extensive experience with anything python related other then providing a few of these resources. I would be interested to see what you come up with.

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