Getting started with Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio 2017

This set of tutorials guides you through the use of Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio 2017. They provide a basic understanding of how the product operates.

These tutorials are designed for developers who have experience with developing COBOL on the mainframe but do not necessarily have a working knowledge of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The tutorials provide a basic understanding of the features offered in Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio 2017 to develop and maintain both simple COBOL and mainframe subsystem applications.

Other tutorials, which are designed for Administrators, are available.

Demonstration application

A preconfigured, fully executing application, MFETDUSER, is available in the installation folder for the samples for this product, %PUBLIC%\Documents\Micro Focus\Enterprise Developer\Samples by default, and in the Mainframe\BankDemo subfolder. This product does not officially support Windows XP but, if you are using it on this platform, the samples are installed in a different folder, C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Micro Focus\Enterprise Developer\Samples.

The demonstration application includes all the source files needed to run it. The application is both a batch and online application which assesses data on a fictitious bank system. The bank data is stored in VSAM files.

Important: Before attempting this tutorial, create a directory named MFETDUSER on the root of your local drive (C:). Then, copy the entire directory structure for the BankDemo demonstration from the %PUBLIC%\Documents\Micro Focus\Enterprise Developer\Samples\Mainframe\BankDemo\MFETDUSER folder into the new C:\MFETDUSER folder.

As part of this tutorial, you use the supplied standard Visual Studio project for Mainframe Subsystem Applications to set up a development environment for this application. The tutorials show how you can:

Edit the source files
Compile the source code
Execute and debug the application

Prerequisites

You must have the following software installed:

Micro Focus Rumba or an equivalent TN3270 terminal emulator is required to run the CICS application.
Note: A license for Micro Focus Rumba is included with Enterprise Developer. If you do not have Rumba installed, please refer to the Micro Focus Web site.

Using a remote enterprise server instance for the tutorials

If you have an active firewall on the machine that is running your Directory Server and enterprise server instances, and you want remote clients to be able to connect to them, you must ensure that the firewall allows access to the ports that you are using.

For example, Directory Server is configured, by default, to use port 86. Your must configure your firewall to allow TCP and UDP access to this port. Similarly, the default enterprise server instance, ESDEMO, has a Web Services and J2EE listener that uses port 9003. For remote clients to be able to submit requests to this listener, your firewall must permit access to this port.

We recommend that, if you want remote users to access Enterprise Server functionality through the firewall, you use fixed port values so that you can control access via these.

Note: Windows XP is not officially supported. If you are, however, using Microsoft Windows XP and have installed Service Pack 2, you might find that you cannot see certain Enterprise Server Administration pages, because of firewall restrictions. To get round this, you need to enable access to the ports you are using, for example, 86 for the Enterprise Server Administration Home page and 9003 for the default enterprise server, ESDEMO. Use the Windows Security Center to do this.