Additional Software Requirements

In order to enable the full functionality of this extension, you need the following software installed:

• A licensed version of a Micro Focus Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer product on the same machine. You must specify the install path for this product in the Micro Focus COBOL: Install Location setting of this extension.

  The earliest supported release is 5.0 unless a newer version is required by a specific feature:

  Micro Focus product (release 5.0 or later)	Compiling	Debugging Native COBOL code	.NET Core COBOL debugging	Language Server functionality
  Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio, Visual COBOL for Visual Studio			Requires release 7.0 or later of this product.	Requires release 8.0 or later of this product.
  Enterprise Developer for Eclipse, Visual COBOL for Eclipse				Requires release 8.0 or later of this product.
  Enterprise Developer Build Tools or Visual COBOL Build Tools (Windows only)			Requires release 7.0 or later of this product.	Requires release 8.0 or later of this product.
  Enterprise Server, COBOL Server
  Visual COBOL Development Hub, Enterprise Developer Unix Components			Requires release 7.0 or later of this product.	Requires release 8.0 or later of this product.

• MSBuild support is only available on Windows platforms.
• Apache Ant - this is required to build Eclipse COBOL project (.cobolbuild) files. Ant must be installed and added to the PATH.
• C# extension - debugging .NET Core COBOL projects requires Microsoft's C# extension version 1.23.12 or later for Visual Studio Code.
• xterm - debugging on Linux requires xterm, the terminal emulator for the X Window System, which is part of your Linux distribution but is not installed by default. Use your Linux installation media to install it.
• .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5 or 5 - required on Windows for the automatic determination of any Compiler directives specified in the .cblproj project files, created with either Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio.

The Language Server features, compiling and debugging require that you specify the location of the prerequisite Micro Focus product in the extension settings:

1. In Visual Studio Code, click View > Extensions.
2. Click (Manage) for the extension, and click Extension Settings.
3. Specify the full path to the installation directory of the licensed Micro Focus product in the Micro Focus COBOL: Install Location field.
4. The Language Server also requires that Micro Focus COBOL: Language Server setting is enabled.