Visual COBOL 11, COBOL .NET rollForward

Hi Neil,

The following response is from our development team:

Right now, we don't officially support .NET 10. We support the current LTS (Long Term Support) version in the next available Visual COBOL/ED release. .NET 10 is LTS (as are the even-numbered .NET versions) so we will support it in 12.0. Because Microsoft only officially supports .NET 10 in VS2026 we will also continue to support .NET 8.0 (in VS2022 and VS2026). At least this is the current plan.

What this basically means is we don't build or test with .NET 10 in 11.0. So, if you run into any problems you're on your own. Chances are you will be fine especially if you stay away from the areas that usually evolve (security/comms related features for example). By and large user code will be fine with .NET 10 because of this. Of course, our own code can equally have issues.

If you install the .NET 10 SDK and build with it, you could run into problems. But at least that is compile time and quick to find. Executing under the .NET 10 runtime requires more rigorous testing as you would be looking for behavioral issues. It really depends on the type of application.

Microsoft describe compatibility issues between versions. E.g. For .NET 10 see here:

Breaking changes in .NET 10 | Microsoft Learn

Nice response Chris, thank you.