Legacy Cobol lives on in .Net

In a move to attract more legacy software customers to Microsoft, Micro Focus Cobol software has been extended to support the .Net Framework.

Micro Focus has also formalised its relationship with the Redmond giant through its Visual Studio .Net Integration Programme.

Many enterprises, including customers of Micro Focus, still have a large pool of legacy Cobol applications. Today's news that Micro Focus' Net Express will be integrated with Visual Studio .Net could help push them towards a Microsoft future.

The move follows Micro Focus' recent unveiling of plans to deliver Cobol for web services.

The company maintained that this gives enterprises the option of renovating and reusing mission-critical Cobol applications so that they can interoperate with newer technologies.

Using the software, Cobol applications will run as managed code under the Microsoft Common Language Runtime, which also means that they can be extended for use over the web.

With the emergence of web services, analysts such as Meta Group have advocated a migration from 'old style' programming languages such as Cobol to more modern 'componentised' systems.

But a demonstration by Micro Focus, Microsoft and retail banking software provider Alnova Technologies has shown a large-scale mainframe Cobol application suite being migrated to .Net to create a universal banking system.