New Features in Visual COBOL 10.0

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The Micro Focus COBOL and Enterprise extensions for Visual Studio Code have been repackaged by Rocket Software on the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace.

• The Rocket^® COBOL Extension for Visual Studio Code (formerly Micro Focus COBOL Extension for Visual Studio Code) provides COBOL edit, compile and debug support for Visual COBOL and Enterprise Developer users in Visual Studio Code.
• The Rocket^® Enterprise Extension for Visual Studio Code (formerly Micro Focus Enterprise Extension for Visual Studio Code) provides PL/I edit, compile and debug support for Enterprise Developer users in Visual Studio Code. This extension installs the Rocket COBOL extension.
• The Rocket^® JVM COBOL Extension for Visual Studio Code (formerly Micro Focus JVM COBOL Extension for Visual Studio Code) provides support for debugging JVM COBOL code in Visual Studio Code.
• The Learn COBOL extension for Visual Studio Code provides all training materials for the Micro Focus COBOL Fundamentals Training course.

New enhancements in this release are:

• Support for accepting command-line arguments in COBOL notebooks.
• New debug launch options - console and integrated Terminal support for platform specific values in the launch.json file.

• Support is available for fine-tuning the colors of different parts of the code in the editor via Visual Studio Code's settings.json file. This requires a minimum release 10.0 of Visual COBOL.

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This release includes the following improvement:

• Two new tools, Get Editor Content and Set Editor Content, have been added to the Eclipse function package. These tools enable you to copy or set the content of an Eclipse text editor to or from a string or file. For example, you can use these tools to change the editor content by an external script written in Python or PowerShell.

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This release provides the following enhancements to .NET support:

• .NET COBOL projects now target .NET 8. You can use .NET 8 SDK or Visual Studio Code to build .NET 8 COBOL projects. Earlier versions of .NET are not supported.

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This release includes the following enhancements:

• The FREE statement - under the MF dialect, you can now free memory, allocated via the ALLOCATE statement, directly by using FREE ADDRESS OF data-name. This negates the need to specify a returning pointer during allocation (i.e. ALLOCATE data-name RETURNING my-pointer) and then freeing the pointer.
• COBOL/Java interoperability - the following features have been added to the COBOL and Java interoperability for native COBOL code:
  • Support for the use of dynamic length COBOL items when running under an MF dialect.
  • User-defined exception handling when calling Java static methods.
• The entry_point_mapper_disable_auto_aliasing run-time tunable - this new tunable has been introduced to determine whether the Entry Point Mapping facility should not emulate the alias function of an IBM mainframe linkage editor, and instead generate a COBRT173 Called program file not found in drive/directory run-time system error.
• Enterprise COBOL support - the following enhancements provide greater compatibility with IBM Enterprise COBOL version 6.4:
  • The STRING and UNSTRING statements now support USAGE UTF-8 data items.
  • The ENCODING phrase of the JSON-GENERATE and JSON-PARSE statements is now supported.
  • The ENTRY-NAME and ENTRY-INTERFACE clauses of the Function-ID paragraph are now supported; however, these clauses are strictly documentary.
• New MF Level - this release includes a new default level (MF"23") of reserved words.
• Pointer dereferencing - improvements have been made in the ability to dereference pointers using both the DATA...AT and :: (colon-colon) syntax.

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This release includes the following enhancements related to integration with COBOL Analyzer and Enterprise Analyzer:

• Natural Language Analysis Assistant in the IDE - integration with COBOL Analyzer and Enterprise Analyzer now provides a natural language Analysis Assistant chat window in the IDE. You can type queries about a COBOL workspace in a COBOL Analyzer or an Enterprise Analyzer repository. From the Analysis Assistant window results you can open Program Flow Graphs, view Complexity Reports, and open COBOL source files.
  Note: This functionality requires a licensed copy of either COBOL Analyzer 10.0 or Enterprise Analyzer 10.0.

• Complexity reports - you can now generate a Complexity Report for a workspace in the Application Server Explorer view. A complexity report enables you to view and compare various metrics of files in your workspace.
• On Windows, the Program Flow Graph (a Windows-only feature) is now available from Server Explorer for workspaces and source files in COBOL Analyzer and Enterprise Analyzer in the Eclipse IDE.

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The following Compiler directive is new in this release:

• ILPOINTER-REFERENCE - Determines how a pointer used as a method parameter is passed if BY VALUE or BY REFERENCE is not specified as part of the parameter.

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Developers can spend a lot time setting up projects, especially when they work on multiple projects that may have conflicting requirements or dependencies. To help alleviate some of this overhead, using development containers allows a developer to create isolated development environments, specified via the use of a definition (json) file, which they can share with other developers. This sharing of the definition file ensures each developer on the project is using the same toolchain, which reduces the startup time for new developers and ensures everyone is developing the software in a consistent manner.

Although each development container has a core specification, developers are able to apply their own customizations without compromising the shared development container specification.

On Ubuntu platforms, this product now provides a full development containers demonstration capable of providing a full COBOL development environment, running in a container, accessible from Visual Studio Code.

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Starting this release, the Customer Experience Improvement Program collects high-level, anonymous information on how Micro Focus products are used. The information collected includes product name and version, OS in use, and features used with the purpose to improve the products and, consequently, the customer experience.

Customer Experience Improvement Program participation is enabled by default. You can opt out with the help of the mfceipconfig command-line utility.

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This release provides the following enhancements:

• Visual COBOL supports, and is shipped with, Eclipse 4.28 (2023-06). Versions of Eclipse prior to this one are not supported.
• Quick fixes - quick fix functionality has been enhanced to provide a list of possible fixes that can automatically be applied from the popup box displayed when hovering over an error in the editor; this is similar to the functionality provided when working with Java.
• Pre- and post-build processing events - script files used as part of build processing events (Properties > Micro Focus > Build Configurations > Events) can now be coded to affect the outcome of the COBOL build process, and also introduce error messages into the IDE. See Pre- and post-build processing events.
• Copybook Graph support - you can now see a graph of the copybook dependencies of COBOL files. The graph enables you to see any incoming and outgoing dependencies.
• Copybook Paths preference - a new preference page has been introduced to help locate copybook files, referenced in standalone files, when debugging. Use this page if your copybook files (or the files that call them) have been moved from their original (built) location. The list is searched in order until a match is found.
• Conditional breakpoints when debugging JVM COBOL now support the use of the following operators: <, >, <=, and >= within expressions.
• Formatting preferences applied on sentence termination - a new formatting preference (Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > COBOL > Editor > Typing > Format sentence on period) formats the current sentence as per the current formatter profile settings, when it is terminated by a period.

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This release provides the following enhancements:

• Remote File Access - it is now possible to remotely access files using a configured Remote File Access (RFA) MFCS Connector. You can access ordinary files, cataloged datasets, and spool output. This also enables remote editing of COBOL data files using the new Data Tools utility. This enables you to download and upload files, datasets, and spool output locally or remotely using the existing Enterprise Server Security configuration. Various security features make this solution a more secure alternative to more generic solutions such as FTP and SSH.

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This release includes the following enhancements:

• Catalog view has improved filtering options and now includes paging. A new Load on navigation check box enables you to filter based on the previously selected conditions.
• A new Configuration Report page enables you to visualize potential security vulnerabilities in the ESCWA and MFDS configurations. Each domain and configuration attribute combination has its own help dialog.
• Role-based security configuration. You can now configure a users view of ESCWA. If a user does not require specific roles then you can hide corresponding pages and API. You can configure the role-based access from the Role Options page. Click Security , expand ESCWA Configuration followed by the ESM, and then click Roles.
  Note: Role-based security is an ESCWA only feature that works on top of existing product security.
• It is now possible to remove Locks, if necessary, to fix applications that are broken due to a lock that has not been removed. You can enable this feature from the Locks page. Click Native > Monitor > Locks, and then click Remove Locks. This functionality is controlled by the casstop resource entity in the OPERCMDS resource class.
  CAUTION:
  Incorrectly removing locks can result in system instability and corruption or loss of data.
• Region verification - ESCWA can now verify the configuration of selected components for an enterprise server region. You can use this feature to identify potential start up or configuration issues for the selected region. The verification process uses the casverify utility to perform the verification action.
• The API return codes have been improved. Previously, when the region monitor and control APIs were called, they would return a HTTP 200 code, with the error specified in the JSON output. The return codes have been improved to give more information. You can configure the API to use the new or old behavior.
• The ESCWA user interface is now more responsive and can be used with a greater variety of smaller Web browsers.

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This release includes the following enhancements:

• Enterprise Server security features provided by the VSAM External Security Manager (ESM) module are enabled by default. You will need to supply valid credentials when you interact with ESCWA, the Micro Focus Directory Server and regions in the browser based UI or in the IDE, use certain utilities from the command line, use TN3270 emulator to access regions, log into or with FileShare. See After Installing > Enterprise Server Security Features for details on how to configure this product.
• TLS Certificate Checking Utility - a new executable in the product that can be used to help diagnose problems with TLS certificates. It can check the validity of certificates, verify certificate chains, check that certificates and private keys match and check that a certificate contains a SAN that matches a provided hostname/address. Improves TLS usability by diagnosing TLS certificate problems. See CertChecker Utility for more information.
• The VSAM ESM Module, which provides file-based security for Enterprise Server is now a GA quality.
  • User authentication and resource authorization control can be enabled through a simple file-based security mechanism.
  • Security data can be imported from YAML or LDIF and exported to YAML for portability and ease of editing / scripting.
• Additional optional security features are available for HTTP and MFBINP conversations, for the Web Services and J2EE, Web, and Remote File Access conversation types. Listeners can be configured to require user authentication and/or to restrict access to specific types of requests. See Enhanced Security for HTTP and MFBINP for more information.

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This release provides the following enhancement:

• The imtkmake -defmap command now support the following new parameters that enhance the default mapping support for service interfaces - entrypoint, method, and path.

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• The SafeNet Sentinel licensing system that was available with previous releases of this product has been deprecated and is no longer available in release 10.0. This product also uses the Micro Focus AutoPass licensing technology which was introduced in release 8.0. Starting with release 10.0, AutoPass is the only licensing technology available in this product.

• The SafeNet Sentinel licenses are no longer supported, and you need to use AutoPass licenses starting with release 10.0. Contact your account manager to replace your existing SafeNet Sentinel with AutoPass licenses.

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This release includes the following enhancement:

• A new configuration file format has been introduced that enables you to use environment variables in your unit test code for tests that are compiled for more than one scenario. A portable environment file can provide environment variables for a test case that has been compiled in multiple ways (for Windows/UNIX, 32-bit/64-bit, etc...).

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This release includes support for OpenTelemetry on UNIX platforms. OpenTelemetry provides observability of Enterprise Server applications by collecting telemetry data. You can configure OpenTelemetry to emit the information that you require and in a form that can be consumed by third-party monitoring software, such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Dynatrace. This can enable you to visualize processes and workflow performance and behavior.