DSL / VS 10 ModelBus part 2
***Disclaimer: This information applies to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 only.***
In the first part of this series I described general concepts around the ModelBus infrastructure. In this second part I will describe the model bus service and how MEF is involved.
The ModelBus as a Service
The Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Sdk.Integration.Shell.10.0 is a VS Package that defines one core service, the IModelBus service.
The model bus service creates and uses its own MEF composition container with two directory catalogs pointing to:
- %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions
- %VS10_Install_Dir%\Extensions
A DSL exports an adapter manager and provides some metadata to specify which adapter this manager manages:
[Export(typeof(ModelBusAdapterManager))]
[HandlesAdapter(“MyAdapterId”)]
public partial class MyAdapterManager : VsModelingAdapterManager
{
…
}
The main responsibility of the model bus is to find registered adapter managers, for that the composition container is used:
container.GetExportedObjects<ModelBusAdapterManager>()
In order to register a DSL with the model bus we need to do the following steps:
- Update the model definition to introduce a domain property that will hold the model reference
- Update the model serialization behavior to include the model reference serialization
- Create an adapter for the DSL
- Create an export an adapter manager for the DSL
- Deploy the DSL under extensions (done automatically at compilation time via the VS SDK msbuild target)
Stay tuned,
Pablo
