Differences between Visual COBOL and Net Express

You can upgrade COBOL applications that were developed in Net Express to Visual COBOL without the need to change their code.

All references to Net Express and Server Express in this guide relate to the variants of those products that provided Mainframe Subsystem Support as part of the Studio Enterprise Edition bundle.

This guide lists the differences between Net Express and Visual COBOL in the following areas:

Compiling and building
Having created a project in Visual COBOL, you can either use the IDE or the command line to build.
Run-time systems
There are some differences between the run-time systems supplied with Visual COBOL and those supplied with Net Express. This, however, will not affect your existing applications and they will continue to run under Visual COBOL - you only need to recompile the applications from the source code with Visual COBOL.
Run-time system technologies
Some technologies behave differently and require some upgrade work.
Restrictions and unsupported features
Some features of Net Express are not available in Visual COBOL. However, there are alternative techniques for many of these features.
Editing and debugging
Much of the Net Express functionality for editing and debugging is available in Visual COBOL, but sometimes with a different name and with a slightly different behavior. In addition there are some new features such as background parsing, which highlights errors as you type and code completion techniques that provide easy access to language elements, enabling you to select and insert them simply.
Visual Studio integration
Visual COBOL is integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio, which provides the functionality to manage projects and debug applications. You can compile your COBOL to native or managed code.

Applications previously built in Net Express can be developed and run within the Visual Studio IDE.