Inside the Azure API Tools for Visual Studio 2013 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Inside the Azure API Tools for Visual Studio 2013

Azure API Tools for Visual Studio 2013 gives developers a quick path to connecting to third-party REST APIs.

By Michael Domingo
03/30/2015

The Visual Studio Team followed the release of the Azure App Service with news that hits closer to the heart of developers: release of the Azure API Tools for Visual Studio 2013. The tools, which are a component of the Azure App Service, provide a way for developers to spit out C# code from within Visual Studio 2013 that is specifically targeted at consuming REST APIs.

"We've added Azure API Apps as a publishing target for the ASP.NET developer, so you can make use of concepts like Resource Groups and App Hosting Plans in the new Azure portal, right within Visual Studio," blogs Brady Gaster, Microsoft's Program Manager with the Web Tools Extensions Team.

Azure API Tools contains a new API App template "that provides dynamic Swagger generation from ASP.NET Web API controllers," said Gaster (Swagger is a popular API framework for interfacing with RESTful APIs.) "Additionally, there is a new consumption system in Visual Studio that provides one-click C# code generation features to make it easier than ever to consume REST APIs without needing to write repetitive HTTP calls or JSON or XML parsing."

Gaster writes that code generated through Azure API Tools is supported by Portable Class Libraries, which means any PCL-enabled platform -- Windows Phone 8.1, U niversal Apps, and Android and iOS (via Xamarin) -- can take advantage of them.

The Azure API Tools will also simplify the process of connecting to APIs. Gaster shows a sample approach to consuming an Azure API app in his blog.

The Microsoft Azure site has a blog that describes how API Apps fit into the scheme of the rest of the Azure App Service tools.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.