The ramblings of a yorkshire tyke » CLR

Getting started with Windows Azure

spgennard — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:12:14 +0000

As someone has been working with Windows Azure since its early days I understand how much effort it takes to get started with the platform. Luckily over the last couple of Windows Azure SDK releases the documentation is started to …

A good new years gift…

spgennard — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 23:44:08 +0000

My day job keeps me housed in Visual Studio 2010/Windows, so for my out of hours development I feel I need a change, so for many years I have been a home mac and/or linux user; anyway I have used …

Michael’s very own “Getting Started with Visual COBOL”

spgennard — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:04:07 +0000

Michael Burgun over at his own blog space has started blogging about using Visual COBOL… Its worth a look as having meet Michael last year I can honestly say he is a very knowledgeable and experienced chap, so I am …

Attachmate acquires Novell for $2.2 billion

spgennard — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:31:26 +0000

Over the last decade I have gained quite a lot of respect for Novell mainly due to their SUSE Linux platform and Mono. Strangely one of the companies involved in the acquisition is “Golden Gate” from San Fran, looks like …

Java… does it have a future? Well not for me..

spgennard — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:20:34 +0000

As someone who has used Java for my own development needs for years, I find it sad the Java platform appears to be falling apart or at the very least getting some bad press. Lets consider the recent events, we …

SQLCLR – Drop Assembly + Dependancies

spgennard — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:53:20 +0000

Recently I have had the pleasure of working on SQL Server 2008 R2 using the SQLCLR support. Which I must admit it is quite nice to use, though a couple of things have anoyed me while using… one of which …

spgennard — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:13:22 +0000

Last week I replied to a post about exceptions, it made me think those programming .Net daily take for granted the etiquette of using Exceptions. So I thought I would share some of my thoughts… well it is a sort …

Extending Visual COBOL 2010

spgennard — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:08:38 +0000

One of the many great reasons for choosing Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as our development platform for Visual COBOL 2010 is it ability to be extended… which we have done but you equally use third party extensions too. One of …

Method Chaining

spgennard — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:50:09 +0000

Creating objects with a complex constructor can be a bit of a pain in any language. One technique I have used is method chaining. It is not applicable to every type of class but it can be useful. Method chain …

Reflection and COBOL

spgennard — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:56:01 +0000

For the last couple of months I have working on Visual Studio 2010 and this include Microsoft CLR v4 and I was recently asked how to write a test that determines at runtime which CLR is being used and what …

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

spgennard — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:55:57 +0000

Microsoft have just updated the “Application Architecture”. I can’t say I have read it from cover to cover but it is being downloaded to my ebook reader… Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition The guide helps you to: Understand the …

A Comparison Of .Net COBOL, Visual Basic and C#

spgennard — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:35:44 +0000

Today my collegues Robert and Alex have finally decided to publish a document that compares Visual Basic, C# and COBOL for .Net under The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Rather than doing a cut-paste job, here is a quote from …

Factory Method Pattern in COBOL

spgennard — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:49:24 +0000

Continuing my series on design patterns for the COBOL, the next one on my list is the “Factory method” pattern. The pattern is useful, as it helps you hide the real implementation/creation mechanism of your classes. I you are fond …

Design Patterns and COBOL

spgennard — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:40:29 +0000

As part of my working life I happy to say I use COBOL and for better or worse it is here to stay. With this in mind it annoys me I here/see saying things such as COBOL is a old …

Type Safety and COBOL

spgennard — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:27:34 +0000

Having read a recent bog about COBOL and type-safety, I though I would jot down some comments. ANS85 COBOL is naturally is type-unsafe due as every data item being part of one memory region (or storage area), because of this …

Base Class Library, Arrays, Queues and Stacks

spgennard — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:41:27 +0000

Continuing the series of blogs about COBOL and the .Net base class library… The .Net base class library has a wealth classes and an huge of amount of methods/properties. The .Net base class library has a key handy namespace that …

Detecting the use Mono CLR dynamically

spgennard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:25:16 +0000

While developing something that could be used on Mono on Windows, Mono on Unix and on Windows with Microsoft’s CLR, I needed to be sensitive to the environment but didn’t want to conditionally compile my code different. So I put …

Arrays and the .Net Base Cass Library

spgennard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:05:15 +0000

Carrying on from the previous blog, the user of iterators in .Net and especially .Net on COBOL can be very useful. When CLR v2.0 was introduced a few new methods in System.IO.File for block reading/writing files were introduced, these works …

Too Iterate or not…

spgennard — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:51:06 +0000

Over the next couple of weeks, I will explore some of the reasons why I think managed environments are good for COBOL. So.. lets the show on the road… Setting up arrays/occurs items in COBOL and manipulating them can be …

NUnit and COBOL.Net

spgennard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:44:44 +0000

A while back, I spent a afternoon converting some C# NUnit documentation into COBOL .Net, so I thought I would share the document with the world, with the hope that it will help any one interested in using NUnit and …