Learning Visual COBOL

As Gael Wilson mentioned in an earlier post: "The Visual COBOL product includes samples and tutorials of Windows Forms that should help you get started and there is an excellent book called Visual COBOL: A Developer's Guide to Modern COBOL by Paul Kelly." This link to this book is Visual COBOL: A developer’s Guide to Modern COBOL – eBook | Micro Focus.

Also, in the Visual COBOL folder on the Windows Start menu you can find the Samples Browser. There are a number of examples in the browser that will demonstrate how to use Windows Forms and traditional COBOL together.

Windows Forms is only available within the Visual Studio IDE. If you use the Eclipse IDE for development you would have to develop your own GUI using Java classes or one of the available Java frameworks. I would recommend staying with Visual Studio.

Thanks Chris.

There are indeed a lot of examples and while I haven't looked at all of them, at least the Win Book example included code I recognize. Its wrapper, and all the other examples I looked at are rife with Object Oriented code. I did see examples for something called the Dialog System which is something I want to learn a bit more about.

I own the book you recommend and if I were interested in learning how to write OO code in COBOL this might be a great book. However, I was lost within the first few pages of the Getting Started chapter as it jumped right into Objects without any leading material. The book did point out that Visual COBOL was introduced in 2010 and I wonder if a predecessor might be more of what I am looking for. I haven't given up yet though as I plan to spend more time with it this week.

Thanks again for all your help.

 @bob13: Dialog System form microfocus is obsolete and old technologie, situation from netexpress 5.1 and since years no new developpments. You must choice visual studio from microsoft or eclipse for developpment.

I work since long time with mf cobol compiler since cobol level 2, then workbench, then netexpress, now visual cobol.

I used in my application "Dialog System" from MF, but this had no future.

Netexpress 5.x was a very good plattform, but not new release, only visual cobol depending on microsoft visual studio for windows applications!  MF is not customer friendly on this!

Hi Bob13 

As Greiner Claude mentioned, Dialog System is a really old piece of technology, it is over thirty years old, and although it is still included in Visual COBOL it is there primarily to support existing customers. Bug fixes continue to be provided as necessary and it was updated a few years ago to support the current Windows visual style but there is no ongoing development. In the Samples Browser in Visual COBOL you will even find samples of Dialog System being used in combination with both Windows Forms and WPF. That's MF being 'not customer friendly'. However, for any new development your initial intention to use Windows Forms (or, alternatively, WPF) is the correct approach.

With regards to your question on books, there isn't an earlier version of the Visual COBOL book or at least not that I am aware of (I'm sure Chris will correct me if I'm wrong !). The book was written to help understand how the COBOL language has been extended and modernised to enable working with new technologies such as .NET classes, I don't think it was intended for learning COBOL itself, but as you said that you have written COBOL programs in the past I didn't think you you would need something like that. 

If you do need something to help you to refamiliarize yourself with the basics there are many books and online resources available and as I said before there are lots of us, both MF employees and customers, who regularly look at the discussions on the forum and are more than happy to help answer questions wherever we can.

The Win Book sample that you mentioned is definitely a good starting point because it shows a form whose content is populated by a traditional COBOL program that was created long before .NET and Windows Forms existed and the tools in Visual Studio allow you to add controls and event handlers to the form quite easily. 

Gael

  and Greiner Claude , I want to thank all of your for your responses and guidance.

Me gustaría poder intercambiar ideas.

Gracias 

Hola Ignacio,

Por favor, publique sus propuestas en inglés para que se pueda comunicar con todos los miembros del foro.

Cuando dice que le gustaría intercambiar ideas, a qué se refiere?

Gracias.

---------------------

Hello Ignacio, 

Please post your queries in English so you can communicate with all members in the forum.

When you say you would like to exchange ideas, what are you referring to?

Thanks.