NET COBOL Dictionary to store a group level entity

Hi.

In native COBOL I have an OO Dictionary that stores entries of the following group level item and this is incredibly fast and suits my purposes perfectly.

I’ve converted this program to .NET COBOL and am really struggling to get this to perform anywhere close to native COBOL because of the overhead converting the PIC entries to a string when outputting to and retrieving from the dictionary.

Do you have any suggestions that may help me to get the process to be performant? 

       01 def-fieldtouse.
          03 def-any-output       pic x.    
          03 def-num-cols         pic x(2) comp-5.     
          03 def-next                 pic 9(18).
          03 def-filename          pic x(100).
          03 def-col-array.
             05 def-columns occurs 800.
               07 def-col-name   pic x(100).
               07 def-col-type     pic x(15).