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I wrote a simple Windows Forms App that runs fine on my PC that has Visual Studio 2022 (VS) and Visual COBOL 8 PE (VC-PE) installed.  When I launch the program in the VS IDE or directly through Windows Explorer, it presents the form.  However, if I copy program to my other PC (that does not have either VS or VC-PE installed it does not.  When I try to run the program, Windows shows briefly shows the hourglass and that's it. The form is never displayed and the program is not in Task Manager.

I am trying to learn something new using something old building something useful to me.

Could someone just confirm that this simply because the executable was built using the personal edition and it requires the development environment to execute? 

I wrote a simple Windows Forms App that runs fine on my PC that has Visual Studio 2022 (VS) and Visual COBOL 8 PE (VC-PE) installed.  When I launch the program in the VS IDE or directly through Windows Explorer, it presents the form.  However, if I copy program to my other PC (that does not have either VS or VC-PE installed it does not.  When I try to run the program, Windows shows briefly shows the hourglass and that's it. The form is never displayed and the program is not in Task Manager.

I am trying to learn something new using something old building something useful to me.

Could someone just confirm that this simply because the executable was built using the personal edition and it requires the development environment to execute? 

Hi Rich,

This isn't just the case for Visual COBOL Personal Edition. It also applies to the full Visual COBOL product. Visual COBOL requires that your computer either has a development license installed for Visual COBOL or a production license installed if you are using the COBOL Server product. COBOL Server is a subset of the Visual COBOL product which provides only the run-time components required to run a COBOL application. Visual COBOL provides these required run-time components which is why you can run your application on your development machine.

The COBOL Server product is not available to VCPE customers as the Personal Edition product is a learning tool and cannot be used for production development.

Hi Rich,

This isn't just the case for Visual COBOL Personal Edition. It also applies to the full Visual COBOL product. Visual COBOL requires that your computer either has a development license installed for Visual COBOL or a production license installed if you are using the COBOL Server product. COBOL Server is a subset of the Visual COBOL product which provides only the run-time components required to run a COBOL application. Visual COBOL provides these required run-time components which is why you can run your application on your development machine.

The COBOL Server product is not available to VCPE customers as the Personal Edition product is a learning tool and cannot be used for production development.

Thank you Chris for that answer to my current and future question. I was trying to be "productive" in my learning by re-creating an old utility I wrote ages ago in another language (to accept parameters,launch command window) that I use on my home desktops.  It was still a good learning exercise for now.

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