Microsoft have end the Support of win7 on 14.1.2020.
What plan MF for their customer who works with Netexpress 5.0 and lower or older Workbench?
Or forced MF all customer to migrate to Visual Cobol?
What plan customers, how do you solve this actual Problem?
Thanks for many answers!
Visual COBOL is the successor product for Net Express and Server Express.
The only version of Net Express that still has any support from Micro Focus is V5.1 and the last OS version under which 5.1 was certified was Windows 7. Support for any older versions had been dropped years ago.
Our official statement on this is the following:
There is currently no end of life statement for Net Express. However, Net Express is not certified on Windows 10 or versions thereafter. This is in part due to limitations of the underlying build tools and Microsoft C-runtime environment with which the product was originally developed. Updating the build tools would require wholesale changes to Net Express and the COBOL runtime system which would introduce breaking changes to COBOL applications. As such, Net Express will remain at this level of Microsoft tooling and customers requiring support for more recent versions of Windows should be considering Visual COBOL for these purposes.
While the Net Express product and COBOL applications developed with it may function on new releases of Windows, this greatly depends on the components used by the application and more importantly, 3rd party software, that is beyond our ability to control. Subtle changes in the Windows platform and 3rd party software can introduce unpredictable behaviour resulting in application failures. Micro Focus will make reasonable efforts to resolve issues reported by customers but strongly recommend the use of Visual COBOL which is fully supported on Windows 10 and above.
You should speak to your Account Manager about moving from Net Express to Visual COBOL.
Thanks.