The ramblings of a yorkshire tyke » COBOL

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 …

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 …

AzureKit and COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:26:19 +0000

AzureKit is a nice piece of source code released on CodePlex by Mark Rendle. The AzureKit makes life much easier for creating, searching, deleting elements in your Azure’s Table Storage. My idea was that if the AzureKit was easy enough …

Programming languages on the rise: Cobol

spgennard — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:43:13 +0000

Although the article/quote below is so true…. Programming languages on the rise: Cobol It may not be fair to call Cobol a niche language as it was once the dominant language in the enterprise. Grace Murray Hopper, famous for finding …

Visual COBOL 2010 R3

spgennard — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:50:08 +0000

For the last couple of months I have been working on next release which is cunningly name: Visual COBOL 2010 R3 Which is surprising since the previous was called Visual COBOL 2010 R2. If you are using any of products …

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch

spgennard — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:01:34 +0000

When I first started working on COBOL I was told that COBOL was a business oriented language that even managers could use It looks like Microsoft are wanting to do something similar in a modern manor using Visual Studio + …

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 …

Life under the dust cloud

spgennard — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 07:20:16 +0000

The week before last I attended Microsoft TechEd here in India, which was a great success. I especially liked my boss “The COBOLATOR“, who did a great talk about his experiences with Microsoft and his views on using COBOL. This …

Visual COBOL @ Microsoft Teched

spgennard — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:23:17 +0000

The last couple of weeks have been very busy and it has unfortunately affected the amount of blog entries I have done but the good news I have plenty of new material.. So, what’s my excuse.. Well we have been …

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 …

Scripting Languages and COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:39:04 +0000

The use of scripting languages with other languages has increased over the last couple of years, from a simple case of interoperability, reuse of scripting code to allowing your code to customised via the user of external scripts. All of …

12 Tips for using Micro Focus COBOL

spgennard — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:36:33 +0000

12 Tips for using Micro Focus COBOL As it is close to Christmas and I wanted to do something with 12 in the title, I’ve thrown together some useful if not un-ordered list of 12 things tips using Micro Focus …

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 …

Free compiler for non-commercial use.

spgennard — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:38:25 +0000

If you are interested in trying out some of my examples with a modern COBOL compiler.. let me give you a quote from a friend. From: Twitter “

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 …

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 …