Compiling Visual Studio Projects

Note:

Visual Studio project support is only available on Windows platforms.
Compiling Visual Studio projects and solutions requires that you have one of the following products installed:
- Micro Focus Visual COBOL for Visual Studio
- Micro Focus Visual COBOL Build Tools
- Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio
- Micro Focus Enterprise Developer Build Tools

The Micro Focus COBOL extension provides auto-generated build tasks for any .cblproj or .sln files. The projects can be for native COBOL or for .NET COBOL code.

The project and solution must be created with either Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio. The .cblproj file, and the .sln solution file must be stored in the same folder that you open in Visual Studio Code or any subfolder beneath it.

To compile the sources:

Click Terminal > Run Build Task.
This shows the Task Picker with the supplied build tasks - one for building the project file, and one for building the solution.
1. Select the file you want to build - either COBOL: MSBuild (<projname>.cblproj) or COBOL: MSBuild (<slnname>.sln).
  
  You can optionally configure which task should be the default one from this widget.
  
  The build output is displayed in the Terminal window. Any errors are underlined with red squiggly lines in the editor.
Check the Problems panel for any issues. Double-click any of the rows to navigate to the lines of code in the editor that contain the issue.