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  • News for PowerCOBOL people

    From pete dashwood@1:2320/100 to comp.lang.cobol on Tue Jul 25 12:13:21 2017
    From Newsgroup: comp.lang.cobol

    The toolkit for migrating PowerCOBOL Projects to Windows Forms
    (PCOB2NET) will be released in the first half of next month (August 2017).

    The tool automatically analyzes your PowerCOBOL sheets and creates a
    Visual Studio Project for a Windows Forms equivalent of each sheet. (The
    new Form will look just like the PowerCOBOL sheet but it will be
    comprised of Windows Forms controls.) You can use the full facilities of
    the Visual Studio Design surface to amend the Form if you want to, and
    the generated Forms can be maintained just like any Windows based Form
    using the facilities of Visual Studio. (VS Express is a FREE download
    and the Express Version is perfectly adequate for maintaining your new
    Forms.)

    Having obtained your new Form(s) you then want to "wire up" the events
    raised by them. PowerCOBOL uses "scriptlets" (written in COBOL '85 or OO COBOL) to do this. The new PRIMA tool analyzes and extracts all of the scriptlets from the PowerCOBOL Project, into a single OO COBOL Class,
    with a separate method for each of the event processes. You end up with
    a generated COBOL Class that drives your new Windows Form. Each Form has
    its own "code-behind" and they are maintained just like any other COBOL
    code.

    You don't HAVE to use COBOL for your code-behind, but doing so saves
    having to re-develop all of the existing code you have invested in your PowerCOBOL system.

    Once you have the Form and the code-behind you are no longer "locked in"
    to PowerCOBOL and can maintain these 2 entities using the standard tools
    that are used for Windows development. We expect to be able to use
    64-bit code-behinds in the near future and 64-bit Forms can already be generated by the tool.

    It takes a skilled PowerCOBOL programmer several hours to manually build
    a Windows Forms equivalent of an average PowerCOBOL sheet, and to
    extract all the event (and non-event...) procedures, and wire them up to
    the new Form. The tool can do it seconds.

    There will be free downloads for people to try the toolkit and there
    will be a comprehensive "inventory" of what the tool supports
    "out-of-the-box" posted on the PRIMA website:

    http://primacomputing.co.nz/PRIMAMetro/PwrCobMigration.aspx

    Cheers,

    Pete.
    --
    I used to write COBOL; now I can do anything...

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