cobol.net

[KLomax]

I work at a small company that has custom software written in cobol.
This software performs financial payment processing.
There are about 300 programs with I’m guessing 1M+ lines of code.
The current platform is Liant RM cobol (16bit dos)
We are interested in possibly porting this code base into “cobol.net”
It looks like there are two major players in this market
- Fujitsu NetCOBOL
- Micro Focus Net Express

Do you know of any resources for more information?
Has anyone had any success porting such legacy apps?
What tools did you use?
What would you do different?
Was it worth it?

[anok4u2]

RE: cobol.net


I use Micro Focus Net Express for .Net. It has syntax compatability with RM
COBOL so you should be able to take your codebase across and build OK.

Generally COBOL is highly portable so you shouldn't have much problems. You
might want to be wary of any 16bit specifics you might have done such as DOS
interupts /api calls etc. These will never go to the 32bit environment never
mind the .Net platform. Its usually quite easy to replace with the relevant
replacement calls.

If your opening up your business logic to the .Net world then you need to
consider how to expose your interface (linkage section).

For example if the linkage for a program you want to expose to the .Net
world of VB or C# is a 01 level with lots of comp-3 , PIC X(n) COMP-1 then
its exposed as a big array to the outside world. In thise case yoy may want
to change the linkage or put a COBOL wrapper that exposes it as nice .Net
language types such as int boolean , float , string objects etc. This makes
it far easier to communicate to the .Net world unless MS add support for
COMP-3 to C# :-).

If your code is COBOL File IO based then that should be OK. I don't know
anything about RM SQL and how compatable with Net Express it is but you can
use EXEC SQL Syntax to either ODBC or ADO.Net. I have tended to use MS SQL
Server as the back end.

Net Express .Net comes with Visual Studio if you don't have that (or it adds
into your existing install) and also has the standard Win32 development
platform. This give you the options of building standard Win32 DLLs or COM
objects to you want to use the logic in C++ or VB type apps. In .Net you
build assemblied as per other .Net languages.

There are some presentations from the recent MF Developer Forum at:-

http://supportline.microfocus.com/examplesandutilities/devforum.asp#Extend

That go into some aspects of COBOL on .Net and there is plently of other
info (more marketing type) on their website.

The sales people at Micro Focus if you contact them should be able to supply
an eval copy for you.

Hope this helps.

Best of luck with your migration.

David.

"KLomax" wrote:
[color=blue]
> I work at a small company that has custom software written in cobol.
> This software performs financial payment processing.
> There are about 300 programs with I’m guessing 1M+ lines of code.
> The current platform is Liant RM cobol (16bit dos)
> We are interested in possibly porting this code base into “cobol.net”
> It looks like there are two major players in this market
> - Fujitsu NetCOBOL
> - Micro Focus Net Express
>
> Do you know of any resources for more information?
> Has anyone had any success porting such legacy apps?
> What tools did you use?
> What would you do different?
> Was it worth it?
>[/color]

[anok4u2]

RE: cobol.net


I use Micro Focus Net Express for .Net. It has syntax compatability with RM
COBOL so you should be able to take your codebase across and build OK.

Generally COBOL is highly portable so you shouldn't have much problems. You
might want to be wary of any 16bit specifics you might have done such as DOS
interupts /api calls etc. These will never go to the 32bit environment never
mind the .Net platform. Its usually quite easy to replace with the relevant
replacement calls.

If your opening up your business logic to the .Net world then you need to
consider how to expose your interface (linkage section).

For example if the linkage for a program you want to expose to the .Net
world of VB or C# is a 01 level with lots of comp-3 , PIC X(n) COMP-1 then
its exposed as a big array to the outside world. In thise case yoy may want
to change the linkage or put a COBOL wrapper that exposes it as nice .Net
language types such as int boolean , float , string objects etc. This makes
it far easier to communicate to the .Net world unless MS add support for
COMP-3 to C# :-).

If your code is COBOL File IO based then that should be OK. I don't know
anything about RM SQL and how compatable with Net Express it is but you can
use EXEC SQL Syntax to either ODBC or ADO.Net. I have tended to use MS SQL
Server as the back end.

Net Express .Net comes with Visual Studio if you don't have that (or it adds
into your existing install) and also has the standard Win32 development
platform. This give you the options of building standard Win32 DLLs or COM
objects to you want to use the logic in C++ or VB type apps. In .Net you
build assemblied as per other .Net languages.

There are some presentations from the recent MF Developer Forum at:-

http://supportline.microfocus.com/examplesandutilities/devforum.asp#Extend

That go into some aspects of COBOL on .Net and there is plently of other
info (more marketing type) on their website.

The sales people at Micro Focus if you contact them should be able to supply
an eval copy for you.

Hope this helps.

Best of luck with your migration.

David.

"KLomax" wrote:
[color=blue]
> I work at a small company that has custom software written in cobol.
> This software performs financial payment processing.
> There are about 300 programs with I’m guessing 1M+ lines of code.
> The current platform is Liant RM cobol (16bit dos)
> We are interested in possibly porting this code base into “cobol.net”
> It looks like there are two major players in this market
> - Fujitsu NetCOBOL
> - Micro Focus Net Express
>
> Do you know of any resources for more information?
> Has anyone had any success porting such legacy apps?
> What tools did you use?
> What would you do different?
> Was it worth it?
>[/color]

[hhinman]

RE: cobol.net

I reccomend Fujitsu NetCOBOL for .NET, which has been in the marketplace
longer than the Micro Focus product for .NET. I have a book on Amazon.com
named "Microsoft .NET for COBOL Programmers" which contains 18 hours of
videos showing theusage of such. If you want to look before you buy, I would
recommend getting a copy of my videos and watching how to program in COBOk in
the .NET environment. Sorry if this sounds self serving, but I think it is
useful to look before you spend several thousand dollars on a COBOL compiler
for .NET

"KLomax" wrote:
[color=blue]
> I work at a small company that has custom software written in cobol.
> This software performs financial payment processing.
> There are about 300 programs with I’m guessing 1M+ lines of code.
> The current platform is Liant RM cobol (16bit dos)
> We are interested in possibly porting this code base into “cobol.net”
> It looks like there are two major players in this market
> - Fujitsu NetCOBOL
> - Micro Focus Net Express
>
> Do you know of any resources for more information?
> Has anyone had any success porting such legacy apps?
> What tools did you use?
> What would you do different?
> Was it worth it?
>[/color]