Product Description

More enterprise code is written in COBOL than any other language. Now that COBOL is being integrated into Microsoft's .NET platform and Visual Studio.NET toolset, businesses and developers have a powerful migration path for bringing their COBOL software into the Web-enabled future. This book gives COBOL developers comprehensive guidance for writing COBOL.NET code -- and migrating existing COBOL code to the .NET platform. Long-time Windows programming expert Dr. Ronald Reeves begins with an overview of the .NET framework and Visual Studio.NET development environment written specifically for COBOL programmers. He introduces .NET's foundations for interoperability, including the Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) and .NET's extensive use of metadata. Reeves shows COBOL developers how to integrate their software with powerful Windows client interfaces using WinForms, and how to build next-generation Web applications using ASP.NET and WebForms. You'll walk step-by-step through building a COBOL based .NET Web service; providing interoperability between legacy "unmanaged" code and .NET managed code; and utilizing advanced .NET capabilities. The book includes a full chapter on COBOL.N ET application design and deployment; and extensive coverage on migrating legacy systems. An accompanying CD-ROM contains all source code, plus additional example programs.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1933566 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover

COBOL and .NET: application migration, design, implementation, and deployment.

• COBOL for .NET: design, coding, and deployment
• Migrating legacy COBOL code to Web environments using
• Fujitsu(r) COBOL for .NET
• Developing COBOL applications with Visual Studio.NET
• Maximizing application efficiency and performance

Now that COBOL is being integrated into Microsoft's .NET platform and Visual Studio.NET toolset, developers have a powerful way to bring their COBOL expertise into the Web-enabled future. In this book, long-time Windows programming expert Dr. Ronald Reeves gives developers comprehensive guidance for writing new COBOL code for .NET environments, and migrating existing COBOL code to the .NET platform. Reeves begins by introducing the .NET framework and Visual Studio.NET development environment from the COBOL programmer's standpoint. Next, he covers every key aspect of COBOL development for .NET, including:

• Providing interoperability between legacy "unmanaged" code and .NET managed code
• Building next-generation Web services and applications using ASP.NET and WebForms
• Leveraging SOAP and the Web Services Description Language (SOAP)
• WinForms: Integrating COBOL software with powerful Windows client user interfaces
• Building COBOL-based database applications with ADO.NET
• Object-oriented COBOL programming using .NET extensions
• Designing COBOL.NET applications for maximum efficiency and performance

About the Author

RONALD D. REEVES, PH.D., is President of Computer Engineering, Inc., a leading consulting and training company based in Howell, MI. He is author of C++/C# Programmer's Guide for Windows 2000 and co-author of Win32 System Services: The Heart of Windows 98 and Windows 2000, Third Edition (both from Prentice Hall PTR).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Windows 2000 is a large and important system, and it is the core of a more embracing architecture that Microsoft calls Windows DNA 2000. In this context, DNA stands for Distributed interNet Applications and represents Microsoft's vision for building distributed systems. This type of architecture is focused on developing the new "digital nervous system" for enterprises. In this context, the "digital nervous system" is the corporate, digital equivalent of the human nervous system: an information system that can provide a well-integrated flow of information at the right time, to the right place in an organization. Such systems can be programmed at many levels, from the lowest level of device drivers giving access to privileged instructions to very high levels using powerful software application development tools. This book is aimed at Microsoft Windows application programming, using the new Fujitsu COBOL compiler and the Visual Studio.Net development environment. The Fujitsu COBOL and Visual Studio.Net discussions and examples are based on the Release Candidate from Microsoft. The book aims to cover most of the important areas needed for practical application development using Fujitsu COBOL, without attempting to be encyclopedic. The book is largely self-contained, including coverage of the core topics of Win32 programming required for Microsoft Windows. The book should prove suitable for programmers migrating to Microsoft Windows from other environments such as Unix and mainframes. A large part of the book addresses issues of which components actually make up the .NET Framework and the Microsoft Windows operating systems. One must realize there are numerous constraints among all the components, and one needs to try to understand from the beginning how they fit into the whole .NET Framework and the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Learning such complex technology can be quite a challenge. The documentation is vast, equivalent to tens of thousands of printed pages, and it is changing all the time. You can subscribe to various Internet discussion groups, and you will receive hundreds of emails every day. There are many, many books on different parts of this technology. But how do you grasp the whole picture? This book aims to be holistic, to provide a practical guide for the COBOL programmer who has used any COBOL compiler. The book provides a tutorial, giving you all the basic information you need to create working .NET Framework application systems. The book and companion FTP site (http://www.phptr.com/reeves) have many example programs in Fujitsu COBOL to aid you in gaining an understanding of how the whole environment fits together.

Before we get into Chapter 1, lets take a snapshot of some of the types of areas and examples covered in the book.

COBOL on the Web

With an increasing amount of business being conducted on the Web, organizations everywhere are asking themselves how to best take advantage of the enormous new business opportunities. Businesses with a lot of legacy COBOL are even more concerned, since most of their applications were built long before the Web became the business phenomenon that it is today. These businesses find that retraining their workforce to use other programming languages, as well as retooling their applications for the Web is a daunting task. COBOL vendors, including Fujitsu, have been selling a variety of solutions for migrating COBOL applications to the Web. Fujitsu's support for the .NET Framework builds on that position and takes several steps forward, allowing COBOL programmers to program directly to the Web and to easily use their existing legacy code.

ASP.NET (language = "COBOL")

ASP.NET is the Microsoft successor to Active Server Pages (ASP), which was designed to deliver dynamic Web content. ASP faced a number of weaknesses in the areas of performance and programmability, and ASP.NET makes substantial improvements in those areas. Instead of being interpreted like ASP, ASP.NET compiles pages to native code. This change results in enormous performance benefits, with only a one-time cost to compile the page when it is first deployed. The other important side effect of the design choice (to compile instead of interpret) is that it opens the door for compiled languages to provide code in ASP.NET pages. Fujitsu COBOL is taking advantage of this important benefit by allowing COBOL programmers to embed COBOL code in ASP.NET pages. The following is a sample ASP.NET page written using Fujitsu COBOL that displays "Hello COBOL world!" in increasing font sizes:

<%@ page language="COBOL" %><% PERFORM VARYING FONT-SIZE FROM 1 by 1 UNTIL FONT-SIZE >   7 %> Hello COBOL world!    
<% END-PERFORM. %>

The "<%@" characters introduce the directive that allows us to set the programming language for the page to COBOL. The

		Please Select A Fruit : 			Orange		Apple		Mango		Pear		Banana			
	

The

tag block surrounds the set of Web Forms controls used in the page. The runat="server" attribute indicates to ASP.NET that the behavior of the control is implemented using code running on the server. This example has four Web Forms controls, whose names are specified using the "id" attribute:

• A select control called "FRUITLIST" that displays the list of five fruits from which to choose.
• An unnamed input button. The "OnServerClick" attribute specifies that the button has a programmed event associated with clicking it. The value of the attribute gives the name of the method that is the event-handler—in this case "FRUITLIST-CLICK."
• An image control called "FRUITIMAGE" that is used to display the image of the selected fruit.
• A span control called "FRUITNAME" that displays the name of the selected fruit alongside the image.

The