Currently I am working on code generation for the DSL we are building. The DSL Toolkit comes with some sort of a framework that can be used to build templates for generating artifacts (based on the model). In this release of the toolkit however, writing templates is a poor experience (just my opinion J). The templates are displayed as “text files” within the Visual Studio.NET 2005 IDE without any syntax coloring. This makes large templates very hard to read. As you can see in the image (small part of the template) below it is very hard to make a distinction between the C# code that is needed for generation the artifact and the C# snippets that are part of the artifact and thus part of the template. The image below is only a simple and small part of the templates so imagine a large template.

The good news is that the DSL team is working on (or at least thinking of) providing a richer template writing experience. Hopefully this will make it in the next CTP release of the DSL Toolkit! I definitely I can’t wait for a better coding experience!

Enough complaining. As you can see in the two images below, it is possible to generate some code based on a model. The template above also shows that navigation the model isn't too hard either (foreach ServiceArtifact in this.Service.ServiceArtifacts). The image shows the C# code that is generated based on the definition of the “service interface” in the DSL designer. No rocket science but it works. Of course, more code can be generated but this is just an example.

One of the artifacts that I will generate (based on the model) will be an xml representation of the modelled concepts and their relations. I think that might become handy if I want to use another code generator engine that isn’t based on the DSL Toolkit Templates and thus might not integrated very well with the DSL model. Hopefully this gives me some more flexibility when it comes to generating the artifacts in the future.

To be continued…