Visual COBOL Now Supports Dialog System Applications

Once upon a time, Micro Focus introduced a slick little piece of technology known as Dialog System.  Its purpose in life was to allow the COBOL developer the ability to build nice looking user interfaces.  In its day, there was nothing better.  Thousands of applications were built using the tooling and everyone was happy.

Then along comes .NET and what was once "leading edge" soon became somewhat obsolete.  But those that build applications using Dialog System were left hanging. 

What do you do with these applications? 

If you are the application owner, reworking them as WinForms or Web Forms was a manual effort at best.  If you are the CIO, having your team completely rewrite these applications just because you wanted a slicker UI was often more work than could be justified.  And Micro Focus hasn't had much of an answer for converting these applications either. 

That is up until now...

With the latest release of Visual COBOL R4 Update 2, Micro Focus is providing tooling to allow you to continue to work with your Dialog System applications or begin the process of converting them to something else.

Yes, its true!  You can either keep them "as is" and continue to support them or you can begin to modernize your user interfaces as it makes sense.  With this new release, there is no longer a need for an "all or nothing" approach. You can either start taking advantage of .NET elements within the existing Dialog System application interface or you can begin moving completely out of Dialog System.

For instance, you want to introduce WPF into your Dialog System application?  Go for it.  You want to drop a .NET grid control into you interface?  Not a problem. 

So, if your shop has an application written using Micro Focus Dialog System screens, you now have options.

For more information, check out the online docs here

Enjoy!

Object Oriented COBOL Fundamentals

Hey folks!
 
Trying to figure out how to transition from procedural COBOL to object oriented COBOL.
 It's nowhere near as hard as folks make it out to be.
 For those new to the site, check out some of the older posts for examples, etc.
 Additionally, there are some really good recordings out on the Micro Focus Community site (http://community.microfocus.com/) that cover the basics of writing object oriented COBOL.

Check out http://tinyurl.com/3czefpm for the first video in the series.
 You'll need to register for the site to see the video (don't sweat it...membership is free *smile*)
 If you need a copy of Visual COBOL to try some of this out, you can download an eval copy at http://visualcobol.microfocus.com/
 Enjoy!

COBOL Gets Noticed!



 Â©A.M.P.A.S.®

 Micro Focus earns Microsoft Technology Partner of the Year Award for Visual COBOL.

Now that is a headline. *smile*

The COBOL Challenge



(Buy this T-Shirt at Zazzle.com)

 What if I could show you how to take advantage of the COBOL you have today? 

Regardless of whether you still have COBOL developers or not.  I'm talking about me showing you how to  take advantage of your COBOL even if you have long since decided to move away from COBOL and have moved on to .Net or Java.

If I give you free software, free training, and free international publicity, would you be interested in finding out if the COBOL still has value for your company?

"Tell us more Robert!", you say with open curiousity. (at least that is how the voices sound in my head)

I'm willing to offer up arranging for you to get temporary licenses of Micro Focus Visual COBOL, some training on the product, and maybe even some help doing the work, if you'll let me tell the world about it.  You and your company can remain anonymous if need be, but I want the story...

COBOL is still the right tool for the job and I want to prove it to you.

I'm especially interested in working with someone in Georgia or Florida (where I spend my time nowadays), but will make this open to one and all.

Let's get creative! 

Want to find out if you can mix C# with existing COBOL? 

Want to transform traditional procedural COBOL into a bunch of objects? 

Want to see if you can deploy COBOL to your JVM?  Or try to tie your customer portal to your backend COBOL application?  I'm game.

If you are interested, send me a note to robert.collins-at-microfocus.com

COBOL is more relevant today than it has ever been.  And I can prove it.

Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Tools?

I've posted a similar questions in the past.  Once I asked my readers "who has learned something new about COBOL recently?".  Very few people were able to raise their hand. 

The reality is that most people learn how to do something one way and continue to do it that way from then on.  And in many areas of life, this makes sense.  No need to reinvent the wheel. 

Hence my question in the title:  Are you getting the most out of your tools? 

The tools have advanced, the COBOL language has advanced, but have your developers?

I met with a company today who uses Micro Focus Net Express, the pre-cursor to Visual COBOL.  After just a few minutes of conversation, I was able to point out some features in the tools they already own that may save their development team significant time and aggrevation. 

I offered to have Jim, my code slinging partner in crime, come by and take a look at what they do and how they are doing it.  I did this with the idea that maybe we can show them a thing or two about using Net Express which could make life easier.

It might be worth revisiting what you can do with the COBOL of today.  Thanks to tools like Visual COBOL I think you may find some extra money in the bottom of the box the tools came in.  I'm just sayin...

Why Build a Reference Environment?

If you are selling cars, it is as simple as "why don't we take her out for a spin?" to show off the car.  When talking about changing the way things will work, it's not that simple.  Folks don't just want to see a simple demo.  Oh, they do expect you to make it look simple, but what you focus on can't be the easy stuff. 

For instance, its simple to demonstrate executing a COBOL program via a CICS transaction.  That's core to what our company does.  But  when a customer wants to see things like "interfacing with a scheduler" and "managing our printers" and "how will operators will manage the platform", you have to have something a bit more robust.  Otherwise you end up doing endless proof of concept (POC) projects to move things along.

A reference environment  lets you demonstrate how the end result will look without having to say "I'll get back to you" or "there are a number of ways that might work".   It allows your customer to focus on the "how do I take advantage of this?" versus "will it work?".  Think of it as a pre-fab POC you can use over and over. 

Its why I've been building one for the last few months...(read more here).  Keep this in mind when you try to sell the boss on the idea of turning that COBOL application into the next killer app based on web services and the .NET framework.  He'll be more inclined to consider it if you have an example.

COBOL and the CIO

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a CIO Forum here in Atlanta.  Two topics seemed to be at the top of everyone's list: cutting costs and mobile devices. 

On the cutting costs topic, almost every CIO there had a story to tell about how they were surviving in this economy.  They were doing it by reducing their costs so that they could survive on the same or smaller budgets than they had last year and the year before.  And they were expected to provide more value to the business than ever before.  Do more with less seems to be the mantra of the day.

On the mobility issue, again most of the attendees talked about how they were being pushed to provide accessibility to their corporate systems by their users/business groups for smartphones and notepad-type devices.  More and more people are plugging their own hardware into their corporate networks and expecting them to not only work, but be supported and leveraged.  As you can imagine, this is causing quite a bit of work for some and creating unique opportunities for others.

I have some good news for them.

Sounds like a job for COBOL! (this is a blog about COBOL after all *smile*).

To help with cutting costs...  why not reuse the business logic that has been captured in the COBOL code and repurpose it?  Turn those old routines into components/services  and redeploy them.  Put together a new UI, combining new features with existing processes.  It is relatively easy to do using tools like those from Micro Focus (I'm sure the other COBOL tool vendors have comparable solutions too).  Either way, reuse the existing code!  No need for those costly "green field" development projects.

One of the large insurance customers that is on your side recently did just this.  They took an old application that was written in COBOL, cut out the screen section logic, restructured the business logic as methods and classes and intermixed these routines with C# and a new Winform interface.  Within a 90 day period, they were able to do more work with a team of 5 or 6 than an entire dev team of 20+ was able to accomplish in 2 years.  Reusing existing application source saved them millions.

To help with the challenge presented by all of these new mobile devices, again, use your COBOL assets and provide your users new ways to access the information they need.  Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.

While at the forum, I had the pleasure to speak with a fellow from a university down in Columbus Georgia.  He walked me through how they were providing their students smartphone apps which interfaced with their back-end applications (yes they were COBOL).  They could access their account details on their phones, their Ipads, on the college computers, etc.  For the IT team, it was nothing short of brilliant.  For the students, their reaction?  *Shrug*  They thought this was how it was supposed to work in the first place.  Go figure *grin*.

So, my message is this.  Companies are starting to figure it out.  COBOL is relevant in today's environment.  How are you making it relevant in your business?