Visual Cobol 6.0 .NET 5.0

Does Visual Cobol 6.0 support .NET 5.0?

I'm asking this because today we started a new project (WinUI3) with a Visual Cobol 6.0 project in the solution. Because of WinUI3 I have to set all projects to .NET 5.0. Everything builds successfully, except for the Visual Cobol project (which I also set to .NET 5.0). I get the error that the dll I want to build cannot be found in the \\ref directory. Is this a known error message? Or do I need to upgrade to a higher version of Visual Cobol?

Hi Rob,

As we discussed in the support case:

This scenario is not officially supported. In Visual COBOL 6.0, we introduced support for .NET Core 3.1 and in Visual COBOL 8.0 it is planned to introduce support for .NET 6.0.

The reason we do not provide support for .NET 5.0 is that it is not a LTS (Long-Time-Service) release from Microsoft.

If you have technical requirements to target .NET 5.0, there is a workaround to bypass this error at compilation, consisting of adding “<ProduceReferenceAssembly>false</ProduceReferenceAssembly>” within the <PropertyGroup> tag, in the .cblproj project file. To do this, unload the project from Visual Studio, edit .cbloproj under your project directory and reload the project again. You will then be able to build the project. However, this is still not an officially supported target framework and Micro Focus recommends that, where possible, you target a supported framework.

Please see the KB article here.

Regards,

Raquel