Re: Micro Focus Visual Cobol 44
Nichole Wernett
Wow after working for many of the greatest banks, like Goldman, Suisse, Privates, big studios like Warner and Sony. all i wanted to do, was try to see how Visual works with Eclipse, so far been trying for 3 weeks. First tried it with Visual Studio was no problem, but too much overhead, and had issues in doing simple things. When I tried Eclipse, everything broke down, have done everything to my pc, just for it to work, now trying for weeks. moving files, partitioning, getting rid of any sub linux subsystems, all that worked perfectly with GnuCobol. But with simple Eclipse and VS Cobol, only was able to get it to work twice the rest of the time, was not able to connect eclipse with VS on a Windows 10 PC. The Customer service been of zero help, no answer from them at all, so i come here, to see if someone could just help me, get it to work. I will say the Visual Studio was with Visual Cobol, but there was no documentation how to open or write files, it was all very confusing, though in straight cobol, on MainFrames or GnuCobol its straight forward. After installing Eclipse the windows way, and then Microfocus Cobol with all the steps in their Docs, with the right license key and all, nothing happens, cant do a simple run of even a display statement, whereas in Visual Studio with Visual Cobol no problem, with vscode and guncobol no problem, with any other IDE and their requirements no problem, only with Eclipse and Visual Cobol has it been a major headache so far, with no help from anywhere.
if i create a brand new program with jvm runtime i can get cobol programs to work, even copying code from other programs, but going through their eclipse microfocus course which i downloaded with the install, is when nothing works. cant get any of their projects to run. its possible that since those projects where created in 2015, and my download of visual and eclipse is from Dec of 2020, not sure.
ok so now i finally got mf to work with eclipse. must say, eclipse uses a lot less overhead than say microsofts, visual studios ide. so will use eclipse for now, next is just to make sure i figure out how to open and create files under the managed cobol of mf
If i can just say this, when i was over at the Microsoft Help Community thing for their Editor, i had a problem with a plugin, though i sent like 20 post, trying to explain my problem, i didnt not get one reply, well i got, like read the manual, or watch this pdf, but after a while i realized that not one, had my setup, everyone was using setups, in Linux, I was the only one in those conversations using WSL, which i realized noone there had ever hear off. To use WSL you need to be part of the latest Microsoft testers or which will be the latest windows which i think will be Windows 20, so we where just going around in circles. And so far I have not gotten one answer, from anyone here, to try and help me fix the issue. Though i ended fixing it by destroying and creating. But now the question i have is, have to use files in MF, so far nothing no answer. Also why dont some of important preferences work in VC, such as, when i right click on a file in VC and go to preferences, so the colors and text and all i can get to work, by following the videos, but most of what the video says doesnt work. So for example in Cobol -> Editor none of Typing preferences work, even though i have smart editing, the lines dont align, comment blocks dont work, I do realize many new people are comming over to Cobol, but they need some way, to be helped just to get started, no one is asking here what 77 or 88 or what tables mean in Cobol, or how to run soap or rest services, just simple stuff. Do i need maybe the EE version of eclipse for these to work, does it work with the PE version of MF, or do i need to MF Visual Cobol version, unfortunately i dont want to waste weeks now, trying all those combinations, uninstall and reinstall, like i have already done, for weeks just to get MF to work with Eclipse, which to me was just step one. you see if i create a Java, C#, Pascal, Kotlin, GNUcobol whatever, there is no issue in any editor, you can write a program with all the options no problem, so far only in Eclipse and MF, has there been major issues, just to get it to run, well that is solved. If i am having these issues, and i know editors and languages than many, imagine someone brand new, how they must be struggling, and why they will probably never want to code in Cobol or ever use MF, ever if they get into all these difficulties, with no help from anywhere. using MF in visual Studio 2017, and 2019 of which i have also tried, worked smoothly, though still didnt figure out how to use files, same with eclipse, but resources required was heavy, and not worth coding in, even using 2017 or 2019 for python or c , which works fine, but you can tell its resource heavy even on an i7 quad. so imagine with MF, how heavy it is, which is why im here with Eclipse, which is so much lighter than VS, and runs so much faster. Besides to use calls from Java with JVM, i have no choice anyways.
From what I can see, you joined the Community Site on December 24th, and then posted on December 25th that you'd been trying to use Visual COBOL for Eclipse product for 3 weeks, and that "The Customer service been of zero help, no answer from them at all". Can you share the details of your attempts to contact support? Did you previously post questions to the Community Site using a different login? I'd like to follow up to make sure that we are being responsive to customer inquiries and support requests. If you would prefer to do this privately, I can be reached at blair.m...@microfocus.com.
I'm having an issue with compiled visual cobol code from our automated build server. When I go to attach the VS2010 debugger to the cobol program, it prompts for a .idy file but in my case the file has a " appended to it. The output idy files don't have a " in the filename and I don't know where in the build process the reference to the idy file is getting messed up. Does anyone have experience with this problem? Just to clarify, Visual Studio 2010 is looking for a file of the form *.diy"