The recommended way to work with files within Visual COBOL is to include them in a project. For situations where you might want to quickly open edit a single file, Visual COBOL now provides support for native COBOL files in the IDE when the file is not opened as part of a project. There is limited support for the IDE editing, compiling and debugging features as full support requires a project file.
To enable full IDE support for single files, Visual COBOL provides a path for creating projects from them - right-click such files in the editor, and click Create COBOL Project.