Net Express 3 to Visual Cobol

The most current version of Visual COBOL is 2.1 not 2.0. R4 is a version older than 2.0.

You should really update to the 2.1 version as there is a new Net Express project import utility.

If you have a folder containing your source and NX project files like C:\\VCSOURCE and you convert the NX project to Visual COBOL then your Visual COBOL Solution will be created in the C:\\VCSOURCE folder and your compiled files will be placed into either DEBUG or RELEASE subfolders depending on the setup of your original NX project.

When you convert a NX project to Visual COBOL the converter assumes that you wish the project folder and output folders to be the same as they were under Net Express.

If you create a new project in Visual COBOL the default is to create a project folder with the name of the project and then a subfolder with the same name that contains the solution and the project file. You can change the output folder to be whatever you like by navigating to Project-->Properties-->COBOL tab-->Output Location.

I would suggest that you get the project import working correctly before trying to compile and run from the command line so that you can debug your application using Visual Studio.

What is the project folder setup that you wish to be using for your builds and debugging?

Will you be building from the command line or from within Visual Studio?

Thanks.

Chris,

Thank you for the quick response. This does help explain what was ocurring. I did open an incident on this (2606953)and added a note since I tried using a tutorial I found on your web site and had both compile errors and execution errors.  We will need to rethink how we will deal with the source and projects.  Currently we use command line compiles to compile source for production installs and we wanted to see if that was still available in VC. Can we use the command line compile ?  If so, any idea why I cannot execute the exe after I get a successful compile ? I will follow ul with the upgrade to VC 2.1 since that will help in our migration. If I am understaning you correctly it sounds like you would need to sets of projects - one for development debugging and then one for the release to production - does this sound correct ?

We are going to be using the Cobol Server as the runtime so then I would compile for the release environment and then copy the exe's & dll's to the server environment ?

Thanks.

The command line tools "cobol" and "cbllink" are still available in Visual COBOL and work exactly the same as they did under Net Express so you should be able to compile and link from the command line without a problem.

I would suggest that when you use these tools that you do so from a Visual COBOL command prompt, either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on how you wish to compile.

These prompts setup the environment required for correct compilation and execution of your programs.

I have no idea what the message is that you are seeing but if you execute the program from the command prompt you should be able to read the message.

You can setup Visual Studio to have both a debug and a release build and you can freely switch between the two.

If you wish to compile for release from the command line you certainly can but you should setup the build script to output your executables to a different folder than your source folder.

You can then deploy your application to a production computer on which COBOL Server is installed by either copying them over or by creating an installation package for them.

Thanks.