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...

SEEN-BY: 154/30 2320/100 0 1 227/0