When you think of Microsoft’s IDE, Visual Studio 2015, perhaps you can be forgiven for not immediately thinking of COBOL. Micro Focus is rectifying the dearth of COBOL support in Microsoft’s newest of IDE with today’s release of Visual COBOL for Visual Studio: a software package that brings full support for the ancient language into the modern enterprise life-cycle environment.
As with previous releases of Visual COBOL, this version includes full-fledged support for the language: IntelliSense, smart editing, auto-complete, code analysis and debugging tools are all here. Additionally, Visual COBOL allows developers to mix their applications with .NET and C# code, bringing more flexibility to their COBOL stacks.
(Related: What’s in Visual Studio 2015)
Ed Airey, director of product marketing at Micro Focus, said, “Application developers want to leverage the tools they know and trust to quickly deliver added value to the business, not reinvent core business applications that continue to provide foundational, irreplaceable business services. Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2015 is the next generation of COBOL development solutions, designed for today’s application developer to do just that, in a productive and cost-effective way.”
Mitra Azizirad works as a developer platform marketing manager at Microsoft. She said that Microsoft is “delighted to have partners like Micro Focus working closely with us to build and enhance the overall development experience of Visual Studio 2015. COBOL-based systems are prevalent in many enterprises, and Micro Focus Visual COBOL helps enterprises develop, maintain and modernize these critical applications.”
