.NET Core / C#, PowerShell

Draw .Net Core project relations with PowerShell and yUML

Avatar of author Kees C. Bakker To profile Kees C. Bakker Written by Kees C. Bakker, written on , 2 minute read.

Having a diagram of how your C# projects interlink, can be a big help. I've created a small PowerShell script that will produce the diagram based on the .csproj projects and their dependencies in a solution directory. It will generate yUML diagrams like this:

The basic idea

We're taking advantage of the fact that .csproj files for .Net Core are XML files. This means they can be queried by Select-Xml.

  1. Find all .csproj files recursively.
  2. Exclude the test projects.
  3. Find all referenced project by querying the //ProjectReference/@Include nodes.
  4. Map each reference (dependency) to the project by generating a [Project]->[Reference] string.
  5. Join all string into a single string with the url-encoded value of ", " => "%2C%20".
  6. Expand this string to a yuml.me URL.
  7. Launch the URL in the browser.

The script

The following code will open up a browser with the diagram:

(ls *.csproj -Recurse -Exclude *test* | % {

    # store for later
    $projectName = $_.BaseName;

    # select project references
    Select-Xml -Path $_.FullName -XPath "//ProjectReference/@Include" |
    Select-Object -Expand Node  |
    Select-Object -Expand '#text' |

    # extract project name for each reference
    Select-String -Pattern '^(.*\\)?(.*?)(.csproj)?$' |
    % { $_.Matches.Groups[2].Value } |

    # create the yUML reference
    % { "[" + $projectName + "]->[" + $_ + "]" }

})  -join "%2C%20" | # join using ", " URL encoded string
% { start -filepath ('http://yuml.me/diagram/plain/class/' + $_) }

Pretty cool, right? Thanks to the guys of yuml.me!

Listing Nuget packagess

If you like to create a diagram of both project and Nuget packages, you can use the following script (the Select-Xml statement is now changed). Note: these diagrams are very large. Some URLs are way too big to start. Handle with care!

(ls *.csproj -Recurse -Exclude *test* | % {

    # store for later
    $projectName = $_.BaseName;

    # select project references
    Select-Xml -Path $_.FullName -XPath "//*[self::ProjectReference or self::PackageReference]/@Include" |
    Select-Object -Expand Node  |
    Select-Object -Expand '#text' |

    # extract project name for each reference
    Select-String -Pattern '^(.*\\)?(.*?)(.csproj)?$' |
    % { $_.Matches.Groups[2].Value } |

    # create the yUML reference
    % { "[" + $projectName + "]->[" + $_ + "]" }

})  -join "%2C%20" | # join using ", " URL encoded string
% { start -filepath ('http://yuml.me/diagram/plain/class/' + $_) }

The diagram will be way bigger:

The URL that the script generates is: huuuuuuuuuge!

Pretty cool, right? Thanks to the guys of yuml.me!

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