Software Requirements

The setup file will check your machine for whether the prerequisite software is installed and will install any missing prerequisites and the product components. A supported version of Microsoft's Visual Studio must be installed in advance.

Note:

Besides the software listed below, the setup file also installs the 64-bit AdoptOpenJDK's OpenJDK 8 (u202) with Hotspot.
This product includes OpenSSL version 1.1.1c.

Visual Studio IDE

You must have Microsoft's Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4 or a newer one installed in advance.

Note: An issue with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 or later affects .NET Core COBOL projects created with version of Visual COBOL earlier than 6.0 PU4. To avoid the issue, install Visual COBOL 6.0 Patch Update 4 or later with Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 or later.

You need one of the advanced versions of Visual Studio listed below:

Professional, Enterprise or Community Edition - see the next section for the Visual Studio components you must install.

Microsoft's Visual Studio Express Edition is not supported.

Important:

When installing Visual Studio, ensure you select the Help Viewer component for installing if you want to view the Visual COBOL product help inside Visual Studio. When you select components to install in the Visual Studio installer, click Individual components and check Help Viewer in the Code tools section.

The following software is also required:

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7.2. This is included with Visual Studio.

Selecting the Visual Studio components to install

The Visual Studio installer enables you to customize and only install the workloads and components that are most suitable for your area of development. For example, you can select the components that are required for .NET desktop development, ASP.NET Web or C++ development.

If not already installed, the Visual COBOL setup file will install the following components:

.NET Framework version 4.7.2.
Debugger
Data services

A number of workloads and components are optional and only required by specific types of applications or tasks:

Azure, WCF, Web, WPF or SQL CLR application development.

If you require any of these, you can select them when you start the Visual Studio installer or, enable them after completing the installation - see the next section.

Installing Visual Studio features that are not currently installed

If a feature of Visual Studio was not installed during the Visual Studio installation, the respective functionality or the project templates for it are not available. You can install a missing feature in one of the following ways:

Rerun the Visual Studio installer:

Start the Visual Studio installer and choose to modify an existing Visual Studio instance.
Select the workloads and the components that are missing (for example, ASP.NET and web development or Help Viewer).
Start the Visual Studio installation.

Use the Quick Launch control in Visual Studio:

Start Visual Studio.
Type the name of the feature in the Quick Launch control - for example, type ASP.NET or Help Viewer.
A drop-down list with any features matching your search string appears. If the feature is not already installed, one of the search results will be an option to install it.

Use the Install Missing Feature(s) command in Visual Studio:

Start Visual Studio.
Click Help > Micro Focus Product Help > Install Missing Feature(s) > Feature Name.
Follow the instructions in the installer to install the missing feature.
Alternatively, if a Micro Focus project template requires a Visual Studio feature which is not currently installed, the IDE displays an information bar with instructions to install the feature.

Other Requirements

Various actions and operations within your COBOL development environment depend on certain files that Microsoft distributes in the following packages: the Windows SDK package and the Microsoft Build Tools package. See Microsoft Package Dependencies for a full list of actions and operations that require one or both of these packages.

By default, the product installation installs the latest versions of the Microsoft Windows 10 SDK, and the Microsoft Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017, to their default locations.

If you need to use any other version of these packages, or use them installed to a non-default location, use the cblms command line utility post-installation to manage this; see Managing the Microsoft Build Tools and Windows SDK Packages for more information.