Way long ago in the very deep past, say 25 years back, COSS used to develop tailor made software using primarily COBOL as a programming language. We built solid, robust and well performing applications, some of them still in production today in their original, character oriented, state. Well, most green screens are now replaced by GUI screens but the business logic still remains intact as it was written originally.

And the business logic still works fine. There is no reason whatsoever why it would not be the case. But in these modern days of technology there are demands we never heared of in those days. We want web services/interfaces, xml data exchange and relational databases just to mention a few.  

So what to do ? We have a staff of very well trained developers and analysts that are very capable of defining business rules and processes, turning them into a UML scheme and develop applications serving these definitions. In COBOL and maybe C++ where needed.

To leverage legacy applications to the modern environment Microsoft offers with its .Net framework there are new skills needed. Skills that are present amongst many young developers who never even sniffed at COBOL even once. Those developers don't even want to know about COBOL because they associate it with the earlier mentioned green screens and limitations COBOL used to have in the past.

Luckily, during the last 7 or 8 years COBOL vendors have been working hard to bridge the gap that has grown between COBOL and other programming languages by introducing new extensions to the language. OO programming is now common in the COBOL language. And even the generation of MSIL has been introduced over 5 years ago.

Although a COBOL programmer today is capable of writing applications without limitations compared to other programming languages there still is one problem to be solved. COBOL no longer is the COBOL of twenty years ago. COBOL has Visual Studio as its IDE and the Microsoft .Net framework offers over 7000 classes, methods, API's, interfaces and so on. It takes about one year to become a proficient programmer in the .Net environment if one is used to mainframe COBOL development.

This presentation covers the solution to this bottleneck. COSS has developed an Application Development Framework that makes mainframe programmers feel quickly at home in the OO environment of .Net. So you can keep your well trained staff productive in the new environment without having to invest in years of training and adding new staff.

The presentation was conducted at the COBOL Future 2006 event in cooperation with Sogeti Netherlands.