Debugging Native COBOL Scenarios

The Micro Focus Debugger is the standard engine for debugging native COBOL applications.

In addition to standard debugging features, Enterprise Developer provides debugging features that, among others, enable you to:

Attach to a running process
Use the Just-In-Time (JIT) debugging feature to connect to a running application when an error occurs during debugging. See To enable just-in-time debugging for details.
Attach to a running program
Use the Wait for a debuggable attachment feature to pause the debugger and launch a separate COBOL debug process before attempting to attach to it. This feature provides three options that you can use to identify the COBOL program to launch. See To launch a debug process using Wait for debuggable attachment for details.
Create and debug a core dump file
When an application crashes, you can arrange for its state to be saved to a core dump file, which indicates where the error occurred in the source code, the contents of memory at the time of the error, and the values of any variables and expressions set at the time.
Catch memory overflows
You can set COBOL Watchpoints on data items to watch the area of memory associated with these data items.
Debug link libraries
Debug a single .dll, or debug multiple .dlls at the same time.
Debug remotely
Debug applications running on a remote machine.

The following scenarios provide additional context for some of these features: