A Short Introductory Guide to the Microsoft code name “M” Modeling Language (Part 2 of 2) [Complete article available in Word Format (196K) for nice printing]

Compiling "M"

Of course, having a bunch of "M" code sitting around is well and good, but to make all those types, extents, and functions useful they must be turned into actual database constructs.

This basically means compiling the "M" code and generating output that can be used to populate a database. For this there are two options:

• Compile "M" from the command-line using the m.exe tool (generally found within Program Files\Microsoft Oslo\1.0\bin)
• Compile "M" from within Visual Studio using the "MCompile" element in a project file. (This option is installed automatically with the "Oslo" SDK. This option instructs MSBuild.exe to invoke m.exe automatically.

Note: it is also possible to dynamically parse and compile "M" programmatically, but that's beyond the scope of this article.

The "M" compiler, as shown in the diagram below, simply parses the "M" and generates some kind of output that can be used to create a database. Typically this is an "M" image (or MX) file that can then be fed to the image loading utility, mx.exe, for deployment into a database. (At which point it becomes accessible to applications or runtimes that make use of that database. Note that "Repository" is shown in this diagram but can be any SQL Server 2008 database.)

Alternately, you can use the "M" compiler to generate SQL statements that can then be deployed using the sqlcmd.exe command-line tool. Let’s look at these different compilation methods in turn. We’ll come back to the matter of installation/deployment later.

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