Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 shipped!

It is interesting to see that the Microsoft Visual Studio 5.0 development environment has been release.

This is important for at least two COBOL vendors (One beginning with F and another with M).

The actual product launch date for VS2005 is November 7th.

When will the COBOL vendor's release their products?

Jason Zander's WebLog - http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2005/10/27/485922.aspx

The cost of doing business

A lot of COBOL application out in the wild are database oriented, so it is nice to see that the
price of transactions are steadly dropping.

If you are interested in the price/figures check out:
Top Ten TPC-C by Price/PerformanceVersion 5 Results

Kind Words

Having just come back from the Microsoft PDC2005 with lots of goodies and ideas in my head about how COBOL can take advantage of this brave new managed world. I was then surprised to get a email from a old college friend who points me an interesting blog..

++QUOTE
Just to quote:

> Joe Rubino's WebLog - Random thoughts of a .Net Architect Evangelist
>
>Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Micro Focus Developer Forum in Atlanta
>and learn about the products Micro Focus has to offer the COBOL developers who want to
>move their applications off of the mainframe or who want to develop object orientated
>applications in COBOL. If you have a large investment in COBOL applications and in COBOL
>development and want to move to .Net I would take a serious look at what Micro Focus has to
>offer. Or if you want take advantage of what .Net managed code and the strict datatypes
>offered by the .Net Common Language Runtime offer look them up. I will provide a link to
>their site in my links section.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jrubino/archive/2005/03/25/402334.aspx
++END QUOTE

Cobol Editing with VIM

Do you use VIM to edit COBOL source code? Well I do especially on Unix platforms...

If so you might want to pickup some of my changes for VIM, it includes new keywords, support for object cobol, source format free support etc...

Anyway, pick it up and comment on it...

Visual Studio 2003.NET and COBOL Margins

While reading Visual Studio Hacks (ISBN: 0596008473), I came across a interesting tweak that is useful to the COBOL programmer if he/she is edit COBOL programs.

If you are using Visual Stdio 2003.NET to edit COBOL files, you sometimes want to see some kinds of margins.. For example:




How do I do it?

Cut-paste the following into a .reg and import into the registry using regedit.


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Text Editor]"Guides"="RGB(128,128,128) 7,72"

Introduction

Hello reader,

My name is Stephen Gennard, I have been working in the COBOL arena for far too many years, so I thought I would start a blog about it.

COBOL is not the trendiest languages in the world but it does have a huge following and as I work for a compiler vendor I thought I would impart some little "tips and tricks".

Even though I work for a popular COBOL compiler vendor I will say if the tip/trick/tweak is vendor specific or 100% generic. After all COBOL vendors do love standards!

Anyway, bye for now.

ref:

COBOL Standards : http://www.cobolstandards.com/
JTC1/SC22/WG4 - COBOL : http://www.cobolstandard.info/wg4/wg4.html
Standards Development : http://www.microfocus.com/whitepapers/developmentcobolstandard.asp?bhcp=1