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Getting Samsung Dex Configured to Work with Azure DevOps Repos


Recently, I upgraded my phone to the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+... I'm a big fan of big phones (a perk to being a big guy). I've always been intrigued with the idea of using one device for everything. Well, with the Samsung Dex application that comes built into these next gen phones, it might be possible...? 

As a guy that spends a lot of time working on ARM Templates and PowerShell scripts for Azure management, I was curious to see if I could get my phone, using Dex, connected to my Azure DevOps environment and start working with repos.... Well, to my surprise, I was able to, and without much pain. So, in this post, I'll run through how I got my Dex environment setup and working with Azure DevOps Repos.

Getting Started
With Samsung Dex open, go to the Google Play store and install Termux (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en_US)

Once that's installed, open it!

Next, we need to gift Termux with permissions to access the phone's local storage. This can be done by executing the command "termux-setup-storage" and clicking the "Allow" button

This will setup a "storage" folder under the termux home directory

Next, let's install some updates with "apt update && apt upgrade"
After that completes, run "apt install git" to install the git cli

Well, with Git installed, we can start pulling code. Personally, I prefer to use Azure DevOps for my code repository when I'm just working on things I'd prefer to keep private. If I ever come up with anything good, I would share it out on Github. But when I'm just messing around and I want a remote place to store my code, AzDO is the place I go. I'll likely cover how to connect this Dex environment to Github at a later date…. At any rate, here's how I was able to access my Azure DevOps repositories.

Azure DevOps Setup
In Azure DevOps, navigate to the User icon > Alternative Credentials

Under the Alternative Credentials section, enter an alternative user name and password

With this in play, navigate to the repository you want to clone and copy the clone URL. Back in Termux Enter the following:

$git clone
***Note; to paste in Termux use Ctrl-Alt-V

BEFORE you hit enter, move your cursor to the front of the URL, right after the https:// and add the user name you just set as the "secondary" account. The full command will look something like this:

As you can see in the pic below, your prompted for the account password, and the repo is successfully cloned. I'm also able to show the remote repo using the "git remote -v" command…



So, to wrap things up for this post, using Samsung Dex, we've set up the Termux terminal application, installed git, and got it connected to an Azure DevOps repo. In the future, I'll explore how to set this up with SSH credentials, which I think will need to be the method used for Github. However, my experience with doing that is a bit limited… So that setup may take a while.

Next time around, we'll explore some code editor applications and give a few reviews around which ones I think would be useful.

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