In Net Express and other Micro Focus products the pcommain utility could be used to automatically generate directives for a program, in Visual Studio this utility cannot be used it seems, so how or is it even possible to do the same in Visual Studio?

There is similar functionality in Visual Studio as pcommain. The Micro Focus plugin adds this to the general Visual Studio options, not under the Micro Focus Options area. In Visual Studio > Tools > Options > Project and Solutions > COBOL project Settings > You can set SQL/CICS directives that will be added when files are added to a Project and the code contains directives related code. When adding existing items into a Solution/Project the source code is scanned and checks if e.g. any SQL or CICS syntax is present, if so it will add the directives you set (if you have set any) in the above mentioned options. This is similar functionality compared to the PCOMMAIN tool.