Looking to convert all our Gui Dialog screens into Winforms...

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 16 April 2012]

Can anyone recommend a good piece of reading material for assisting in converting our current GUI Dialog (circa 1999) into Visual COBOL Winforms?

I'd just really like to get rid of the screens and build afresh if possible but am a beginner when it comes to the .NET protocols & stuff!

Hi Mark,

I would definitely recommend getting up to speed with .NET before even considering the conversion and as a prerequisite, you’ll also need to get pretty comfortable with object-oriented semantics too, if not already.

.NET is an enormous framework of technologies, you’ll never learn it all but you don’t need to. If you’re keeping your application as a thick client, then you’ll probably be looking at WPF for the user interface.

Once you have these skills in hand, the main challenges when converting Dialog System to .NET are:
• Scale of the application
• Coupling between UI and business logic
• Use of GUI and Base OO libraries
• Event driven model in Windows WPF, WinForms, etc, versus the dialog system method.

If the existing application is reasonably well architected, you may be able to separate and reuse much of the existing application code.

There are other approaches to modernizing DS apps, that involve .NET and COM interop, that might be a smaller step to take, see here for more info.

We’ll do our best to answer any questions you have on the forum but if you have a .NET buddy you can call upon, that would certainly come in very helpful.

Micro Focus can provide some education on using Visual Studio and intro to some of the OO pieces - a preview of that is here.

Regards, Scot