The Visual Studio editor has been extended in a number of ways to enhance its support for COBOL, including Standard Visual Studio 2010 features for program navigation are exploited for COBOL applications.
- Fully integrated COBOL development environment delivers high programmer productivity by exploiting Visual Studio tools and providing instant feedback.
- Enhanced COBOL syntax for .NET programmers makes it easier for COBOL programmers to use .NET services or for programmers with .NET experience in other programming languages to be productive with COBOL.
- Visual COBOL supports the development and deployment of both "managed" .NET (with multi-targeting for .NET Framework V4 and earlier versions) and "unmanaged", native code applications.
- Visual COBOL is a part of the Visual Studio 2010 product portfolio from Micro Focus which also includes testing and developer productivity tools.
- COBOL Margins - visual indication of COBOL margins which are sensitive to the COBOL margin directive currently selected for the program – if the setting is changed via an embedded "$SET SOURCEFORMAT" directive, then the display is immediately updated.
- COBOL sensitivity is extended to support COBOL methods and data items in IntelliSense and preconfigured "code snippets" reduce the effort required to complete code and avoid errors being introduced.
- Background parsing continuously ensures that the code being worked on will compile cleanly.
