I’ve been working with the Azure IoT Gateway SDK quite a bit lately and the project setup experience is not only repetitive, but also somewhat error prone. Make a dozen settings changes here. Forget a setting there. Edit a few CmakeLists files.\Watch the build explode. Fix. Build AGAIN. Rinse and repeat.

I figure it was time to not only document the whole process, but encode it with PowerShell; ‘cause “infrastructure as code” and if computers do anything well, it’s to at least make the same mistakes in a repeatable fashion. So let’s whip up a script that will perform the following tasks:

1. Create a new project directory
2. Clone the Azure IoT Gateway SDK from GitHub
3. Clone the Modbus sample module for the Gateway from GitHub
4. Edit the relevant CMake files to include the sample Modbus module
5. Build the SDK
6. Create a Modbus module configuration file with all the correct settings to just ‘work’

While this example is tuned to building the Gateway SDK’s Modbus Sample module, it could quite easily be adapted to build and configure any of the SDK’s included samples or other add-on sample modules like the OPC-UA Client.

I’m a fan of constrained and declarative input so let’s start by defining an Enum with the allowable transports for the IoT Hub. The available options are ‘AMQP’, ‘HTTP’ and ‘MQTT’.

We can then sett up all the pieces of configuration for the project, the IoT Hub, the device mapping and the Modbus Read module.

After some troubles getting the environmental variable set up for the SDK’s build script, I turned to Stack Overflow for some assistance and was we well rewarded. Bill Stewart stepped up with a few functions to make the process easier; his reply to my question includes his great Windows IT Pro blog post on the topic of PowerShell environment variable imports … well worth a read. For the sake of simplicity we’ll just add them directly to the script.

Next, we’ll create the project directory and use git to clone the relevant repositories there. Note that git uses stderr output for some output that is not really an error and the use of the --quiet or -q option for clone does not truly silence the stderr output. There are some details in this Posh-Git issue.

We can now move the Modbus module and associated sample into the SDK repository and amend the relevant CMake files to have them built when we build the SDK.

Let’s move into the SDK directory and copy the current state of the session’s environment variables for restore after the build.

To build the SDK on Windows, the documentation notes that we need to run from a Visual Studio Command Prompt. Behind the scenes, this special command prompt calls a batch file that sets up IDE options and tooling for building, debugging and deploying. If you right click and check the properties for the shortcuts you’ll find a call that looks like this:

%comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" amd64_x86

The operational gist here is to open a command prompt and keep it open, using the /k switch, after running the vcvarsall batch script with, in this case, the x64/x86 argument. We’ll leverage the functions I noted earlier to call this batch file directly, adding the environmental variables to our current PowerShell session, and the call the SDK’s build script. Note that we’ll skip running the SDK’s unit tests and finish by restoring the environmental variables to their original state.

As of the writing of this post, the build will complete with a few warning from the compiler as noted in this Modbus module issue.

We can now turn our attention to setting up the gateway’s configuration file for execution. We’ll want to reference the template configuration file for the Modbus gateway module and read it into a PowerShell object.

From here, we can pick out the various parts of the configuration file settings that need values and can conclude by serializing the configuration to a file in the SDK’s build directory. Take note that the parsing library that supports the gateway can only parse ASCII and UTF-8 encoded configuration files. PowerShell’s default encoding for the Out-File function is Unicode and without specifying the encoding the gateway will blowup with a non-descriptive error at run-time.

You can now navigate to the compiled Modbus sample (cd .\build\samples\modbus\Debug) and run the compiled Modbus gateway sample with the following command:

.\modbus_sample.exe .\modbus_win.json

The complete script can be found here. Open up an Administrator PowerShell ISE session, paste the code, modify the various settings for your demo project and run.

Happy Coding!