Debugging Scenarios in Native COBOL

Micro Focus debugger

Micro Focus debugger is the standard engine for debugging native COBOL applications within all the Micro Focus development products for COBOL.

Debugging applications

The rest of this section provides information on the different approaches to debugging native COBOL applications using Visual Studio:

  • Attach to a running process - use Just-In-Time (JIT) debugging to enable the debugger to connect to a running application when an error occurs.
  • Attaching to a running program - you use the Wait for a debuggable attachment option. With it the debugger waits for the program to start in a separate process before attempting to attach to it.
  • 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 can indicate 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.
  • Debug link libraries - either directly, if the project only compiles to a single .dll file or, for a project that compiles to multiple .dll files, by specifying one of the .dll files as the Start external program option.
  • Catching memory overflows - you can set COBOL watchpoints on data items to watch the area of memory associated with these data items.
  • Debugging applications running on a remote machine.