Avoiding Code Page Conflicts in .NET Managed COBOL

Code pages are not often a consideration for traditional COBOL application development. However, they require attention in the advanced system Visual COBOL, which interacts with the rich code page support of the Microsoft .NET framework.

Visual COBOL follows the default behavior of Visual Studio by creating all auto-generated code files as UTF-8. The Compiler automatically compensates for this by detecting if the source code can be read as UTF-7/ASCII. If it cannot, all the files in a solution are saved as the appropriate code page, thereby avoiding corruption of PICTURE clause data items.

Code page conflicts can impact WPF and WCF projects, where by default:

• Visual Studio auto-generates code in UTF-8 encoding. The code page of the auto-generated COBOL matches the code page of the source XML code.
• Existing or new programmer-generated COBOL have the code page of the platform locale.