Rocket® Visual COBOL®

Hello – I’m developing an app that needs to copy data from one database to another database.  I have two DB2 LUW instances DB2COPY1 (DB2 / SQLLIB) and DB2COPY3 (DB2_02 / SQLLIB_02) running on my laptop.  They both have one database, IAINT001 on DB2COPY1 and IATEST01 on DB2COPY3.  Both of them are cataloged to their respective instance and connect fine in ODBC. In my Rocket COBOL program, if I connect to database IAINT001 first, then connect reset, then connect to database IATEST01, the connection to IATEST01 fails with SQLCODE -19703, as below.  However, if I switch the sequence of the databases and connect to database IATEST01 first, it works.  After the connect reset, the connect to database IAINT001 fails with SQLCODE -19703, as below, just like database IATEST01 failed above. SQLCODE -19703 seems pretty generic.Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?.... 

Hi, I requested Visual COBOL Personal Edition for Eclipse (Windows). The download link points to download-eu.rocketsoftware.com, but it always returns ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT from different networks. Could you provide an alternative download link? Thanks.

Hello Team, I am integrating the VS code for COBOL development and i have blocker on the debug part as i am not able to get the connection to VS code when the batch is executed, do we need to set up extra in the launch file?

Is the use and setting of the FCD information different between native COBOL and NET COBOL?My reason for asking is that I have taken the code from our native application straight across into a NET COBOL equivalent and I am finding that setting the address for the file name and key block is not being taken across to our external filehandler correctly.

Is Visual COBOL not supported in Visual Studio 2026? I received this message when trying to open a .sln created in VS 2022.Thanks

When running my program, I am getting this error:    A 9D,03 error means the XFD is missing - but it is in the folder that our batch file is pointing to, and it is the correct layout.  Anything else that would be causing this error?

My company currently uses Net Express 3.1 and will be migrating to Visual COBOL within the next several months.  We use the SPZERO compiler directive on majority of the programs we migrated off the mainframe several years ago.  This is due to having spaces in numeric fields on the old mainframe data files.  At the time of migration, it was better to use SPZERO than to modify the files/programs.  I read in the Visual COBOL documentation that SPZERO has been deprecated and is not supported in Visual COBOL.  Is there an alternate way to accomplish the same behavior as SPZERO in Visual COBOL? Thanks,Ben#VisualCOBOLautoscalemodescreenresolution#COBOL#netexpress

Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2022 11.0.0 failing install on windows server 2022. Visual studio community edition is installed, version 18.4.3 and “Workload for C++ Desktop Applications “ is installed. Setup fail with error:81f40001 - Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 17.8 or later has not been detected anyone enconter this issue?

Hi There,We are looking for migrating a IBM Mainframe application to cloud and considering conversion to Rocket visual cobol. The application is a batch application consisting Cobol, JCL, DB2, VSAM, Flat and Tape files. The JCL would need to be converted to shell, VSAM to ISAM, files to Linux standard files and Db2 to Postgres. Can you please share the basic architecture and solution framework for Rocket Visual Cobol migration. Also, what all licenses need to be considered for target side from Rocket perspective.    Regards,Gauri

In native COBOL we could define a dictionary and that could be set as external which allowed us to access it via our external filehandler. In .NET COBOL it seems it is no longer possible to define a dictionary as external.Can anyone suggest an alternative given that the information that can be passed to an external filehandler is limited and controlled by the run-time?

Should you use dotnet build or msbuild to compile COBOL assemblies to .NET core 8?For example if I wanted to do a local recompile of my whole applications, I have a PowerShell script that does the compile, but I used “dotnet build”When I went and loaded a project and compiled,  I think I observed after using “dotnet build” then using Visual Studio you get a file tracking log file error, “The tracking data is invalid”  FTK1013.Agreed dotnet build is more lightweight, but are there other consequences?Neil

Running Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition and Visual Cobol Personal Edition. Fired up Visual Studio and tried to open one of my solutions. Received  the attached errors. All the programs in Solution Explorer were marked ‘Incompatible’.  I’m unsure as to whether this means my license has expired or whether it is a different problem.Please see attached.TIA

Hi everyone,As summer is in full swing and we're preparing exciting product updates for later this year, we'd love to hear about your experience with our COBOL modernization solutions.Your feedback helps us improve our products, create more relevant content and events, and better understand your evolving business needs.Please take a few minutes to complete our short survey, it should take no more than 15 minutes:https://app.userevidence.com/surveys/cdf209d1-37ff-49b7-a7da-8caaf173f4cd/shareAs a thank you, five randomly selected participants who complete the survey will receive a $50 USD Rocket Software gift card. Winners will be contacted after August 10.Thank you for your time and valuable feedback,your Rocket COBOL Team

Windows Server 2008 R2 StandardService Pack 1LicensesNo limit, local hostedCobol Server (Production)the license server runs, and the runtime refers to that server for the license. Can i revoke the license on the llicense server, then revoke the production server license, and reinstall with the same number on the runtime server, except not referring to the license server, but local? Local is how our staging runtime server is set up. Just want to put that out there, in case there are other issues.

Hi all, For an analysis I’m exploring the ESCWA portal. I got it set up using the Visual Cobol installation.It comes with a trial key. All looks great. I can program COBOl and run the applications. Greate.But then, when I try to create a region in the dashboard, I’m prompted that “I have no valid license”.When I check the license manager that came with the installation, it shows I have 500 more days left.So the “portal” doesn’t consider this license.I then thought “perhaps I need to get a trial license for the server seperate”, but it’s impossible to find. Support also isn’t being helpful.I could find this link to “request a trial version” but it’s not working properly, hence I don’t know they receive 30 requests by now or it never went through: http://cabs.microfocus.com/products/enterprise-suite/enterprise-server/trial in the portals and confsing different dashboards, i could find something like “download trials”  but it never shows the enterpreise server. Is there any way to set up

Hi,When the source file (CBL) and any ancillary copybooks have been saved with an encoding of UTF-8 BOM then I am getting some strange behaviour with characters such as high-values when moving a PIC X group into a string and then moving it back out into a PIC X group.My question is whether there a compiler option or some other mechanism whereby the source files are automatically converted to ASCII or UTF-8 at the time of building the dll?Thanks

We have a number of tables in Microsoft SQL that are defined as uniqueidentifier. When accessing this column type the OpenESQL interface, using ODBC, returned this column type as a char(36).Modifying our native code to .NET and using ADO it appears that this column type is returned as a 16 character binary column type.My question is whether you are aware of this and whether there are other column data types that behave differently when using ADO as opposed to ODBC? Peter