Category Archives: Tips

Design Patterns and COBOL

Posted on November 29, 2009 by spgennard

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 … Continue reading →

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El Parador and the Choocolate Line

Posted on November 25, 2009 by spgennard

Dear Webblog Diary Last friday night we spent the night in London and we found a really good little Spanish Tapas restaurant and I thought I would share it… just because we enjoyed it soo much.. The place is called … Continue reading →

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Detecting the use Mono CLR dynamically

Posted on November 17, 2009 by spgennard

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 … Continue reading →

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Arrays and the .Net Base Cass Library

Posted on November 13, 2009 by spgennard

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in CLR, COBOL, Tips | 4 Comments

Too Iterate or not…

Posted on November 10, 2009 by spgennard

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 … Continue reading →

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Fiddling with the JVM

Posted on November 9, 2009 by spgennard

Java is a very safe language if used in a normal way, however just like the CLR it can be used in an unsafe manor. The main reason for using Java in a unsafe manor is performance, some unsafe operations … Continue reading →

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NUnit and COBOL.Net

Posted on November 6, 2009 by spgennard

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 … Continue reading →

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Object COBOL/Java default exception handler

Posted on November 3, 2009 by spgennard

While working on some support recently for our compiler (Micro Focus COBOL compiler that is), I became annoyed with the lack of a reasonable error messages/stack trace output from our Java/COBOL Object support. I have no idea why our default … Continue reading →

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Cheap Mobile phone tip for use in Spain

Posted on October 30, 2009 by spgennard

While visiting Spain/Madrid my partner finally managed to get a pay-as-you mobile that she could charge without requiring a spanish credit card, which never of us have, as we live in the UK. Anyway, the mobile just cost €20 from … Continue reading →

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TomTom Xl Live and missing traffic updates

Posted on October 28, 2009 by spgennard

We recently move from our trust TomTom One to the wizzy TomTom XL Live. Unfortunately some where in the update process, the TomTom live was only part activated…. basically the TomTom traffic update kept complaining the account did not have … Continue reading →

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