Instead of using the official SDK we hand rolled a REST client with method to build request and data types to (de)serialize the transferred state.

In mid-18, when this journey started, the SDK was still not available for dotnet core.

For me, the SDK is notorious for it's lack of testability. No interfaces are used and constructors expect live connections that do actual calls.

The lack of interfaces makes it nearly impossible to stub requests to the point where you need to return representative JSON documents or even have a live connection to Azure DevOps.

Though the REST API is pretty well documented it turns out the official fronted uses a handful of 'REST' calls that are not official available. Simple tasks like retrieving all groups and the members of that groups is a real pain with the graph API (not sure if it is even possible).

Even when using the official SDK you have to deal with low level details of the API endpoints in a way the SDK is not really helping. You need to know how to construct a group name with some magic name for example. So its even easier to reverse engineer the XHRs that the frontend makes when altering permissions.

The working of this client is documented here.