You can upgrade COBOL applications that were developed in
Net Express,
Server Express to Visual COBOL
without the need to change their code.
All references to Net Express and Server Express in this guide relate to the variants of those products that provided Mainframe Subsystem Support as part of the Studio Enterprise Edition bundle.
This guide lists the differences between
Net Express,
Server Express and
Visual COBOL in the following areas:
- Compiling and building
- Having created a project in
Visual COBOL, you can either use the IDE or the command line to build.
- Run-time systems
- There are some differences between the run-time systems supplied with
Visual COBOL and those supplied with
Net Express,
Server Express. This, however, will not affect your existing applications and they will continue to run under
Visual COBOL - you only need to recompile the applications from the source code with
Visual COBOL.
- Run-time system technologies
- Some technologies behave differently and require some upgrade work.
- Restrictions and unsupported features
- Some features of
Net Express,
Server Express are not available in
Visual COBOL. However, there are alternative techniques for many of these features.
- Editing and debugging
- Much of the
Net Express,
Server Express functionality for editing and debugging is available in
Visual COBOL, but sometimes with a different name and with a slightly different behavior. In addition there are some new features such as background parsing, which highlights errors as you type and code completion techniques that provide easy access to language elements, enabling you to select and insert them simply.
- Eclipse integration
- Visual COBOL is integrated with the Eclipse IDE. The development environment provides all the functionality to manage projects and debug applications.
Applications previously built in
Net Express,
Server Express can be developed and run within the Eclipse IDE.
