Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2.3 for Visual Studio 2012 > Welcome > New Features > Features Added in Visual COBOL 2.1 > Managed COBOL Enhancements

Managed COBOL Enhancements

Delegates and Events

This release provides support for combining delegates, using the METHOD keyword to specify method groups, and implicit conversion from a method group or an anonymous method to the suitable delegate type.

Handling Invalid Numeric Data

The handling of invalid numeric data is controlled by a number of Compiler directives: HOSTNUMMOVE, HOSTNUMCOMPARE and SIGNFIXUP. These directives were previously only available in native code but are now supported in managed code.

Resolving Types

In this release, the Compiler attempts to resolve types to those defined in the current compilation unit wherever possible. The Compiler will attempt to resolve such types to an external name only if no suitable type exists in the current compilation unit. For example:

$set ilusing"System"
class-id MyNamespace.EventHandler.
01 o type EventHandler.                       
end class.

In this release, 01 o type EventHandler. resolves to MyNamespace.EventHandler and not to System.EventHandler.

Specifying Properties

In previous versions of the products, properties declared using the PROPERTY keyword on a data item were generated as final properties. Starting with this release, they are generated as virtual properties by default. In order to make the properties final, you need to specify the word FINAL following PROPERTY. This change may affect the generation of Proxy classes, for example, if you are using WCF.