Developer March

OFF THE PRESS

Micro Focus Integrates Visual Studio 2010 in Cobol Tools Micro Focus has announced four new Cobol products to allow developers to...

ODA Open Design Alliance Announces DWGdirect.NET Beta Release The Open Design Alliance (ODA) announces the beta release of DWGdirect.NET,...

Use Intel Alpha SDK to Write Netbook Applications and Earn Money Intel has announced a new opportunity for developers to earn money by writing...

WHITE PAPERS

Hot and Safe: a Beginner's Guide to Multithreaded Libraries Most of the discussion of multithreading that emerges from Cilk Arts is...

8 Simple Rules for Designing Threaded Applications Multithreaded programming is still more art than science. This white paper...

Maximizing Digital Media Application Performance using Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives in Microsoft* .NET* Environment Microsoft .NET framework's interoperability mechanisms can be used to create...

OFF THE PRESS

Micro Focus Integrates Visual Studio 2010 in Cobol Tools

For the last 50 years, COBOL has been the enterprise language of choice for most businesses. There is a mind boggling 250 billion lines of COBOL code in the world today and every day there are 200 times more COBOL transactions than Google searches. Whilst many programming languages have come and gone, Cobol has managed to stay ahead of the curve, the Country Manager for Micro Focus in India, Ashish Masand, had announced at the 2009 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit.

Now Micro Focus has announced four new Cobol products to allow developers to utilize Cobol tools directly from within Visual Studio 2010. The new products are to aimed at helping application developers analyze, develop and test code, simplifying their tasks and challenges. The Visual Studio 2010-tuned tools from Micro Focus include:

1. Micro Focus COBOL: a tool to exploit existing enterprise applications on the Microsoft platform so organisations that operate COBOL-based applications can take advantage of Visual Studio 2010 without the need for rewriting their applications

2. Micro Focus Silk4J: a functional and regression test automation tool that brings test automation capabilities to Visual Studio 2010

3. Micro Focus DevPartner Studio: a suite that enables debugging, analysing, testing and tuning applications, ensuring rapid root cause analysis and increased developer efficiency

4. Micro Focus Analyzer Express for Visual Studio: a visibility tool to help day-to-day maintenance activities, which traces data flow through a program with one click of the mouse from within Visual Studio 2010

At GIDS 2009, Ashish had spoken about how organisations are working to bring a “new” Cobol to existing new age developers in a way they already understand, without the need for huge amounts of re-training. In his keynote, he covered updates ranging from new graphical user interfaces for developers to replacing the outdated command-line interface, and bringing Cobol into the “cloud” where applications are hosted online instead of only being installed on a desktop, server, or mainframe.

Ashish's statements were seconded at the recent launch by Peter Duffell, Vice President, Strategic Partners of Micro Focus, who said “Our presence in the roll-out of Visual Studio 2010 demonstrates both the relevance of core COBOL assets within global organisations’ IT infrastructures and the demand from the developer community to exploit them on Microsoft platforms." Further, Eurorealm Consultants' Neil Willby, a beta customer for the new Micro Focus COBOL, confirmed “We’re excited to see Micro Focus playing such an integral role in the launch of Visual Studio 2010. COBOL continues to play a major part in today’s economy, so it is essential that Visual Studio 2010 embraces these tools and allows the developer ecosystem to evolve existing core applications on new platforms.”

Cobol being more than relevant today and ubiquitously present, continues to grow its footprint despite the decades of technological changes that have questioned its importance, and largely failed, to replace it. At GIDS, expert developers from Micro Focus had conducted in-depth sessions on how COBOL is getting younger with .NET, using COBOL in the Cloud, working Java and COBOL together, enterprise .NET, the Eclipse COBOL Java triangle and AS/400 platform interfacing and migration strategies for enterprise Java and Enterprise 2.0. Micro Focus' Nav Saini also conducted three-hour long workshops on mainframe in a box, achieving platform independence, and extending Cobol to SOA, Web Services and beyond.

VIDEOS

JavaScript for the C# Developer With the proliferation of thin-client web applications, sooner or later every C# programmer will likely have to write some JavaScript. What could go wrong? After all, it's just another...

PODCAST&VIDEOS

.Net Collections Deep Dive The .NET framework provides a rich set of collection classes, crafted to help you address a multitude of tasks. But, let’s face it, we rarely use this vast array to the scope that...

Caring about Code Quality We all have seen our share of bad code. We certainly have come across some good code as well. What are the characteristics of good code? How can we identify those? What practices can...

Design Patterns for .NET Programmers Between lambda expressions in C# and functional programming in F#, we can now make use of patterns well beyond those popularized by the so called GOF. In this presentation we will learn...

Stepping into the Near Future of the IDE Ever wonder what it might be like to write code in the future? DevExpress’ Mark Miller will explore trends in tools & human interfaces and preview interesting & exciting...

Quality First - Building Quality Into Your Application Throughout the Lifecycle Application quality is often considered as an afterthought and put off until late in the application lifecycle. To consistently deliver high quality products, quality should be...

The Entire Game Should Move Onto the GPU, says Rev Lebaredian As the computing functionality and horsepower of GPUs has grown over the last few years, the role of the GPU is rapidly expanding to game tasks beyond rasterization-based graphics. Now...