License expired or different problem

Hi Paul,

This error means that the Visual COBOL extension is no longer installed into Visual Studio. What Visual COBOL version are you using?

There was a problem with Visual Studio 2022 when upgrading to version 17.13.4 or higher that broke the Visual COBOL installation.

There is a KB that covers how to fix this which I will include below but I would recommend downloading the Visual COBOL PE 11.0 version that is available on the PE download website. There are now 2 installers, one for Visual Studio 2022 and one for VS2026 because it is hard to get VS2022 anymore.

The KB article is as follows:

This issue is resolved with the following Patch Updates:

• Patch Update 24 for Visual COBOL 8.0
• Patch Update 18 for Visual COBOL 9.0
• Patch Update 8 for Visual COBOL 10.0

It is possible to continue using the previous Patch Update levels by rolling back to a previous version of Visual Studio 2022 that worked. This can be done by:

1. Launching Visual Studio Installer
2. Clicking More for Visual Studio 2022
3. Clicking Rollback to previous version

There is another workaround, but it requires a caution to follow each step:

1. Close all instances of the Visual Studio 2022 IDE
2. Open Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022
3. Issue these commands to determine the location of the PkgDef file of the COBOL extension (i.e. CBLPRJ.PKGDEF):

   CD %DEVENVDIR%\EXTENSIONS
   DIR CBLPRJ.PKGDEF /S

4. Note the last command will return the location where CBLPRJ.PKGDEF is located. Here is an example:
   Directory of C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\XXXX\Common7\IDE\Extensions\YYYY
   where XXXX is the edition of Visual Studio 2022 (e.g. Community, Professional, etc.)
   where YYYY is a random string as the name of the subfolder where CBLPRJ.PKGDEF is located
5. Issue this command to change directory to the subfolder where CBLPRJ.PKGDEF is located:
    

   CD YYYY

   where YYYY is the name of the subfolder identified from previous step
6. Issue this command to edit CBLPRJ.PKGDEF in Notepad:

   NOTEPAD CBLPRJ.PKGDEF

7. Search for the following line and delete it:
   "TemplatesDir"="\\"
8. Search for the same line a second time and delete it
9. Search for the following line and delete it:
   "TemplatesDir"="\.\NullPath"
10. Click File > Save
11. Close Notepad
12. Issue this command to apply the changes to the COBOL extension in Visual Studio:

    DEVENV /UPDATECONFIGURATION

13. Close the command prompt
14. Launch Visual Studio