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 sure he will impart some of his own wisdom..
The articles are: .NET greenfield development in Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2010
and today’s article, Getting started.
Just a quick blog to document a bit of pain I hit with CAPICOM and SIGNTOOL..
I got the following error:
EXEC : SignTool error : Signtool requires CAPICOM version 2.1.0.1 or higher. Please
The solution is to download and install:
Then regsvr32 on capicom.dll… eg:
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 + supper duper templates…
Here is what Computer World UK has to say about “Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch”.
Microsoft turns on Visual Studio LightSwitch
Visual Studio LightSwitch is easy enough for business managers
Microsoft is gearing up to release a version of its Visual Studio integrated developer environment that it promises will be easy enough for even business managers to use.
I understand this is not COBOL but the reasons sound very familiar…
From: Computer World UK – Microsoft turns on Visual Studio LightSwitch
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch
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 alex, along with a link to the “real” article itself.
Enjoy.
Alex Turner said:
A Comparison Of .Net COBOL, Visual Basic and C#
Introduction
If you are a COBOL programmer wanting to learn C# or a VB programmer wanting to learn COBOL as a .net language (or any other combination of VB.net, C# and COBOL) then this is a good place to start.
Background
If you are a COBOL programmer wanting to learn C# or a VB programmer wanting to learn COBOL as a .net language (or any other combination of VB.net, C# and COBOL) then this is a good place to start.
It has often been noted that the richness of the COBOL language in its Micro Focus .net implementation is not well known. Robert Sales and I have worked on this document to help bring the language to peoples’ attention and to help people who need to work with COBOL on the .net platform.
My boss (Mark Conway) the other day was lucky enough to demonstrate some of the wonders of next release at TechEd 2009 in the keynote with Jazon Zander’s entitled: “Visual Studio 2010: New Challenges, New Solutions”
The demo shows off some of the nice features of Visual Studio 2010 and how we looking to use it for COBOL. I think it looks great!
Tip: Skip to about 34 mins into it for Mark
Click here for TechEd Online – for the actual video
And finally here is Jazon Zander’s Blog.
