Editing COBOL Projects with Different Versions of Visual Studio (Project Round-Tripping)

Visual COBOL supports the Visual Studio Project Round-Tripping feature (or Backward Compatibility for projects) with COBOL projects. Project Round-Tripping was first introduced in Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). It enables you to use different versions of Visual Studio to edit the same COBOL project without the need to perform a project upgrade.

Project round-tripping enables you to open and change a project in one of the Visual Studio versions and, after closing it, open and edit it in the other version - no upgrade will be applied. Project round-tripping ensures your projects will be unaffected if some people in your organization use one of the supported Visual Studio versions while others are using another one to edit the same applications.

These are the requirements and restrictions of using project round-tripping with COBOL projects:

• If you are switching between Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013, your managed COBOL application can target versions of the .NET Framework 2 to 4.5.1.
• Starting with Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2012, the COBOL SQL CLR projects have a new project format. COBOL SQL CLR projects created with Visual Studio 2010 will be upgraded when opened in Visual Studio 2012 or later.

Working with different versions of Visual Studio installed on the same machine

Visual COBOL for different versions of Visual Studio can co-exist on the same machine which makes it easier to test your applications against the different versions of the IDE.

Compiling for COBOL Server

Applications created with Visual COBOL for different versions of Visual Studio targets the same COBOL run-time system product, COBOL Server.