A few weeks ago at BUILD, we announced the upcoming Azure DevOps MCP Server:
👉 Azure DevOps with GitHub Repositories – Your path to Agentic AI
Today, we’re excited to share that the local Azure DevOps MCP Server is now available in public preview. This lets GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code access and interact with your Azure DevOps environment, including work items, pull requests, test plans, builds, releases, and wiki pages.
🤷♂️ What is an MCP Server?
A local MCP Server (Model Context Provider) is a tool that sits between your AI assistant (like GitHub Copilot) and your Azure DevOps organization. Its job is to inject rich, real-time context such as work items, pull requests, test plans, etc., into the prompts sent to the LLM. This lets the assistant give better, more accurate, and more relevant answers tailored to your specific Azure DevOps project.
Unlike cloud-based solutions, a local MCP Server runs inside your network or development environment. That means it can safely access private data and tools without that data ever leaving your system.
📽️ Example
You can find several example videos and prompts in the how-to guide. One fun example shows how you can take a user story, generate a set of test cases with detailed steps based on the work item description, and then link those test cases back to the original user story.
If you have ideas or need examples for specific scenarios, feel free to create an issue in the repository.
⭐ Getting Started
Getting started is relatively easy, but it does require a few setup steps. Here is a quick overview of the steps, but we do recommend you follow the full installation and setup instructions provided in the repository to ensure everything is configured correctly.
- Navigate to the Azure DevOps MCP Server repository.
- Sign in using the Azure CLI:
az login - Copy and paste the configuration into your local
.vscode\mcp.jsonfile. - Start the MCP Server and begin using the tools.
💬 Feedback
We’re actively collecting feedback throughout the public preview stage. If you run into any issues or have suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Please create or comment on Issues directly in the Azure DevOps MCP Server repository.
Dan, can the ADO MCP Server be accessed via URL(it’s called StreamServerTransport I guess) from the app in the cloud, for instance?
I don’t think so. I think that would require a Remote MCP Server, which we don’t have yet.
Actually MCP server is a some kind of wrapper on top REST API(or it can be), so we can wrap required ADO calls(create pull request for instance) by ourselves into custom MCP, host it in the cloud and call from our app?
Will the MCP server also be available/compatible with Azure DevOps Server (on-prem)? From the description above (using az login) and from having a look into the GitHub repository it looks like currently only Azure DevOps Services is supported.
At the moment the MCP Server does not support Azure DevOps on-prem. There are several APIs we interact with that are not yet available for on-prem. We will likely not support it for a few months (at least) as we work through bugs and requests while in the public preview stage of things.
We are also very interested!
We are also interested in the ADO Server support!
I wonder if it is realistic to that it could be part of the Q4 release mentioned earlier by Gloridel:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/april-patches-for-azure-devops-server-and-team-foundation-server-3/?commentid=4791#comment-4791