Accelerating time to delivery - Modern tools for COBOL development

2. Accelerating Time to Delivery:
Modern Tools for COBOL
Development
Michael Bleistein, Principal Architect
Steve Wellmann, Senior Solutions Engineer

3. Project Templates and Snippets
 Modern Visual Studio and Eclipse IDEs provide a mechanism for modern
application types
 Provide a Rapid Start to you project
 Specific templates for types of Applications
• ASP.NET Web application
• WCF/Web Service
• COBOL/JVM
 Build Your own customized templates for Reuse by other team members
• Create a Project
• Modify Project Settings
• Export as a template

4. Project Templates and Snippets
 Snippets help speed coding and
generate syntax more quickly
 Snippets provided for commonly
used OO syntax in Visual COBOL in
Visual Studio
 Custom snippets can be added as
part of standard Visual Studio
functionality
 Use the Code Snippet Manager to
Edit or Create Code Snippets

5. Demonstration
Project Templates and Code Snippets

6. Dev Hub - Efficiency in Cross Platform Development
 Multiple Developers can work together against a Linux or Unix Server
 Code, Compile, and Debug your code directly on your deployment
platform
• Advanced Editing for COBOL
• Advanced Debugging/Remote Debugging
 Benefits of a modern IDE with Eclipse
• Project templates
• Build and Debug configurations

7. Make rapid progress with platform technologies
 Visual COBOL can be combined with other technologies seamlessly
• Accelerates bringing new features into an application
• More resources available for standard modern technologies
• Speed up Coding and Testing
 The managed code class frameworks themselves: .NET and Java
 3rd Party Class Libraries for .NET
 Testing technologies
• SilkTest
• nUnit and jUnit
• Improve the consistency and quality of application and unit testing
 3rd Party Extensions and Plugins for Visual Studio and Eclipse
• Have Visual COBOL and your favorite add-on tools in a single IDE

8. Demonstration
3rd Party Tools and Technologies

9. Standard Build and Deploy options
 MSBUILD
• Built-in to .NET.
• Integrated with Visual Studio
• Easy to get started with MSBuild in Visual Studio - it's all behind the
scenes. If you want to get deeper, you can hand edit the files
• Provides a better fit for Visual COBOL into existing build/deployment
cycles that use MSBUILD
• Server/Build support resources don’t have to get familiar with
another proprietary technology

10. Standard Build and Deploy options
 ANT
• Very popular in the Eclipse and Java world for build and deployment
easily extends to Visual COBOL
• Scripts are written using plain XML. If you are already familiar with
XML, you can learn Ant pretty quickly.
• Good at automating complicated repetitive tasks.
• Ant comes with a big list of predefined tasks.
• Provides an interface to develop custom tasks.
• Can be easily invoked from the command line and it can integrate
with free and commercial IDEs.