You can create an empty project in the Visual Studio IDE, then create the programs and the other components that it uses.
You can create a managed code project based on an existing mainframe application or an existing native Enterprise Server project.
When importing existing COBOL source files into a project, the import process scans the source file. For each imported file, this scan determines the COBOL dialect, and whether or not it needs to be compiled with the CICS ECM. It then sets the file-level properties accordingly.