Chapter 4: Start Here for the Tutorials

Welcome to the "Getting Started" tutorials of Mainframe Express!

4.1 Overview

If you've come to this book from the Start Here! screen in the help, you've probably come straight to this chapter, skipping the earlier chapters. This is the last chapter in Part I. From this chapter, you can go straight into the other Parts, which consist of tutorials. There's one Part for each option in Mainframe Express. Each Part contains one or more chapters, each of which is a tutorial session.

(You should read the earlier chapters in Part I at some point. They give an overview of what's in Mainframe Express, and lots of practical advice on finding information in the documentation.)

These sessions assume you're familiar with COBOL and with the mainframe equivalents of the supported features - for example, CICS or IMS - but that you've never seen Mainframe Express or any other Micro Focus software before, and that you have only a basic knowledge of the operating system you're using - Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows NT V4.0.

It's essential that you read the following before you start.

4.2 Terminology and Conventions

Windows	In this book, we generally say "Windows" as an abbreviation for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and/or Windows NT 4.0. These three operating systems are very similar.
Version numbers	Any version numbers in the text on menu items are omitted in the examples.
Mouse buttons	We assume your main mouse button is the left-hand one. If you've configured your mouse to reverse the buttons, please swap the words "left" and "right", as applied to mouse buttons, throughout.
Clicking	The word "click" means a single click of your main (left-hand) mouse button. If you are to double-click or right-click, the instructions say so.
Case	In general in these sample sessions you need not worry about using exactly the combination shown of upper and lower case. Windows is not case sensitive. The few places where case is important are indicated.
Directory and folder	In Windows, the terms directory and folder are used interchangeably. You enter a directory, and a directory has subdirectories. Equivalently, you open a folder, and a folder contains other folders. In the Mainframe Express documentation, both types of terminology are used. In this book we mostly use the term "folder".
Drive	In PC documentation, the name of a top-level ("root") folder is often preceded by a backslash and the letter of the drive - for example, c:\mfuser. As we don't know which drive you've installed Mainframe Express on, we will write d: for the drive letter. Replace this by the letter of the drive where you installed Mainframe Express.
Path	The name of a folder, preceded by the name of the folder containing it, and the folder containing that, and so on up to the root, is called its path. For example if gsdemo is within projects, which is within mfuser, its path is \mfuser\projects\gsdemo. If necessary the drive letter can be included, for example c:\mfuser\projects\gsdemo.

4.3 Tips

Using this book	Your screen may get crowded during these sessions - you'll often have several windows open. If you're displaying this book online in your Web browser, it may frequently be covered by other windows. You may prefer to work from the printed book. However, the online version has many links to help you move quickly through the book. A good compromise is to print out each chapter from your browser, and keep the browser open in a small or minimized window, enlarging it when you need to use the links.
Cross-references	In these sessions, cross-references you might want to look at immediately are written as links. Cross-references suggesting places to look later are not links.
Windows techniques	Some Windows techniques that are commonly used are described briefly in the appendix Windows Tips.
Reloading projects	Successive sessions sometimes use the same project. If you close Mainframe Express between sessions, you will find it useful to know the ways you can reload a project. Optionally, when Mainframe Express starts, it loads whatever project was open when you closed Mainframe Express. To turn this option on, click Customize IDE on the Options menu, then click the Workspace tab and ensure there is a check mark by Reload files and Project on startup. Click OK to close the dialog box. Other ways of opening an existing project are to use Open, Open Project or Recent Projects, which are all on the File menu.

4.4 Tutorials Map

Each session is one chapter. In the online version of this book, you can get to a chapter by clicking its box below. It's essential that you do the first session before any of the others. After that, the following tree diagram shows their interdependence - if two tutorials are joined by an arrow you must do the first one before the second.

These "Getting Started" tutorials are intended to give you a quick introduction to the areas they cover, by taking you through some of the most common tasks. Full information on all these areas is in the Help and the online books, as described in the chapter Finding Information. The Help and online books are all accessible from your Windows Start menu.

tutorials map

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