Rocket® Visual COBOL®

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

Hello Team,Currently we have Enterprise developer already available in the system , I am trying to integrate VS Code using Rocket COBOL extension to do a BRD documentation using the Co-pilot features. We have two copybooks extension ,one with CPY and another COPYCOB. The intelisense is  able to identify the CPY copybooks but not the COPYCOB eventhough the extensions are mapped. Is there possibility to re-use the XML files of MFED for the integration of VS code.ThanksSanoop

I am trying to code Cobol programs, compile and execute. I need help on what I need to download to accomplish this. I  have worked on IBM mainframes using Cobol, jcl, ISPF, TSO, etc many years ago. I want to restart now. Please advice on what I need to do to get started. Thanks.

I have a relational database with a one-to-many table. When reading it in COBOL, I believe it's necessary to read the record key from the main table and the related records from the secondary table; I believe a read should be performed from the main table record key, and the related records from the secondary table would be stored in an "occurs" of that record.The  code  FD :  FD ARCHIVO-NUEVO.01 REG-NUEVO-FISICO.05 Fis-RecNumber PIC 9(6).05 Fis-Nombre PIC X(30).05 Fis-Tabla-Pagos.10 Fis-Nuevo PIC 9(8) OCCURS 100 TIMES. Is correct???Thanks

Hi everyone,I downloaded Visual COBOL for Eclipse Personal Edition Ubuntu 11.0.zip, but I am unable to complete the installation because of a license issue.The bundled license XML file appears to contain the following License Group:Visual COBOL for Eclipse Personal Edition_Windows-RPv1Since this is the Ubuntu/Linux download, I expected the license file to be for Ubuntu or Linux, not Windows.Has anyone else seen this issue with the Ubuntu 11.0 Personal Edition download?Is this Windows-RPv1 license XML actually valid for Ubuntu/Linux, or is the wrong license file included in the download package?If this is not the correct file, how can I obtain the correct Ubuntu/Linux Personal Edition license XML?Thanks.

Hi everyone,With the release of Rocket Visual COBOL 11 and Rocket COBOL Analyzer 11, we’ve introduced GenAI Insights helping any developer easily understand and navigate COBOL applications of any size and complexity.Discover what’s possible with GenAI Insight under 90 seconds:If you have any questions let us know in the comments,Your Rocket COBOL team

I have Visual COBOL + Microsoft Visual Studio on my Windows 11  laptop. I inadvertently deleted the shortcut that I used to launch Visual COBOL+VS. I cannot figure out how to restore the shortcut. Can anyone advise me on how to rebuild the correct shortcut? Thanks

Hello everyone,I just (6/4/26) download Visual COBOL for Eclipse Personal Edition Windows 11.0.zip   The C:\ProgramData\Micro Focus\CommuterLicFile.xml file is empty.License Administration cannot gener license.Anyone can help with generating trail license? How? Thanks.MA

Hi everyone,If you’re interested in exploring a new GenAI capability that helps plan, generate, and analyze unit tests for COBOL, the AI Unit Testing for COBOL beta is a great opportunity to try it firsthand. Feel free to sign up or share this post with colleagues who may benefit. COBOL applications weren’t originally designed with unit testing in mind, which has made adoption notoriously challenging. In this beta program, you’ll gain hands-on experience with GenAI-driven unit testing and learn how to adopt it without making any changes to your production code. Learn more and register here: linkIf you have any questions, please reach out. I’d be happy to help. 

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

I’ve been using VC11 for Eclipse (Windows) for a couple of months now, and this seemly random highlighting of this is really getting on my nerves.  The image below shows a “simple” example.  It is often much worse.Here I just put my cursor on the top left and then cursored down some lines.  When my cursor reached line 14 the entire line, plus the first 3 characters of line 15, were suddenly highlighted for seemingly no reason.  Cursoring down again it removed highlight from 14 and highlights 15.  Other examples seem to be even more random.  Is this a known issue or what?  Anything I can do?  The only way to unhighlight is to open the Find box (Cntl-F) and then hit escape. 

I came upon the following and figured I’d give it a try:  https://docs.rocketsoftware.com/bundle/netexpress_ug_51wrappack1_html/page/opclap_15.htm#s016As long as the ACTUAL-PARAMS compiler option is specified immediately before the template class (my term), you can build out the full class with the specified name and based on the specified class parameter.  Specifically “$SET ACTUAL-PARAMS(ELinklist Employee)” will build the ELinklist class with Employee being the “parameter class”.  Specifically, the parameter class “Element” in the source for PLinkList will be replaced with actual class Employee.But what if I want a second one, say ALinklist with class Another as the parameter?  If I put “$SET ACTUAL-PARAMS(ALinklist Another)” below the earlier ACTUAL-PARAMS it will create ALinklist, but ELinklist seems to be gone.I can post my exact source code if necessary.