PowerShell, PowerBoots and an Oslo DSL Grammar

David Langworthy, the Microsoft architect who owns The “Oslo” Modeling Language Specification, has these “Modeling in Text” videos HERE that walk through the specific process of creating a domain-specific language.

Intellipad

Working from his example we’ll compile grammar and transform the DSL into Xaml using PowerShell to read and create PS Custom Objects.

• I ‘embedded’ the DSL (lines 1-6)
• The DSL Grammar (lines 9-26)
• Called the M tool chain
  • line 28 the M Compiler
  • line 29 the MGrammar Executor

Then

• Read the Xaml file produced
  • Converted it to an XmlDocument, line 31
  • Looped through the entities in the graph
• And generated PowerShell Custom Objects

Finally

• Using PowerBoots line 38
• The DataGrid from the WPF Toolkit
• Displayed the results

From DSL => DynamicParser => Custom Objects => WPF data bound control

Using the M tool chain in this ways has it’s advantages in several scenarios. This script can easily be streamlined by checking file dates and bypass the m and mgx steps.

In future posts we’ll see if we can interact with the MGrammar namespace and work with Oslo in a deeper way.