Programming Languages for the .NET Framework

Cobol 2002

Hitachi has a long history of involvement with COBOL. Their current product is being jointly developed with NEC and is called COBOL 2002. As its name would suggest it supports the 2002 Standard; this latest standard of COBOL supports modern programming features such as support for object oriented programming. This implementation also enables COBOL applications to execute on top of the .NET runtime. This enables customers to modernize their COBOL applications by taking advantage of the full .NET Framework.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes (.NET 1.0 & 2.0)
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit : Cobol 2002 in Japanese , Cobol 2002 in English

Fujitsu is one of the industry leaders in legacy software modernization; their products concentrate on bringing COBOL assets to .NET.

COBOL presents an interesting problem for IT managers. COBOL is an extremely stable programming environment in that has been used to build some of the most complex and mission critical software systems in the world. However, it was first introduced in the late 1950’s and the number of available COBOL programmers is shrinking every year.

Fujitsu offers NetCOBOL to help customers modernize their COBOL assets and bring them onto the .NET environment. Once there, they have access to the same .NET Framework that C# and Visual Basic developers have access to.

The COBOL-related features that integrate with Visual Studio from Fujitsu are listed below.

NetCOBOL for .NET

Fujitsu NetCOBOL for .NET is a COBOL compiler created specifically for Microsoft's .NET Framework. This means that it produces Microsoft's Intermediate Language (MSIL) code that executes under the Common Language Runtime (CLR). This language-neutral, platform independent environment enables COBOL code to be mixed with any other .NET-supporting language (such as C#, F# and VB .NET) on any .NET-supported platform. NetCOBOL also takes advantage of all the .NET Framework classes – including those that create XML Web services , it also uses Visual Studio tools such as the solution explorer, editor and debugger. NetCOBOL implements an Object Oriented (OO) COBOL syntax, and supports .NET-specific extensions, so that COBOL programs can be written to take full advantage of the .NET Framework classes. The NetCOBOL Media pack includes Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Standard Edition – a value-packed add-on delivering this award-winning development environment for NetCOBOL for .NET developers.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit NetCOBOL for .NET.

Find Fujitsu extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

Micro Focus Net Express® with .NET

• Micro Focus Net Express® with .NET is the market-leading COBOL development environment for extending core business processes to the .NET Framework and other distributed platforms. Powerful integration with Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework plus direct COBOL Web services capabilities, J2EE connectivity and XML support allow easy integration of existing and new COBOL applications with leading enterprise technologies. Micro Focus Net Express® uses the highly-productive Visual Studio development environment to provide a complete environment for quickly building and modernizing COBOL enterprise components and business applications while reusing existing code. Applications created are managed and verifiable COBOL applications integrated within the .NET Framework. Migrated applications can then expose existing COBOL business processes as Web services and share data across disparate applications with XML or perform B2B and B2C transactions using XML. New Graphical and Web user interfaces can be added in COBOL or other languages. The implementation also allows you to leverage COBOL applications in a J2EE-compliant manner from a Java applications server such as IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Oracle Application Server and Jboss. Micro Focus Net Express®

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit the Micro Focus Net Express site. 

Find Micro Focus extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

PowerBuilder

PowerBuilder is a 4GL rapid application development tool. PowerBuilder blends new and emerging technologies into a data-driven development tool, allowing developers to rapidly create mission-critical client/server, distributed, Web and Smart Client applications for JEE, Win32, and .NET platforms. The latest version of PowerBuilder brings .NET interoperability enhancements, DataWindow innovations and many other new capabilities to make your job even easier, your applications even more robust and your development even faster. PowerBuilder gives .NET developers the flexibility and power to bring existing applications into or build entirely new applications for .NET WinForms, WebForms and Smart Clients. Delivering on another phase in our .NET roadmap, PowerBuilder 11.5 provides Support for Strong Named Assemblies, the ability to access .NET static, primitive and enumerative classes and support for IIS7.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: TBD

For more information, visit Powerbuilder.

Find Sybase extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

Visual RPG

ASNA is a long-time player in the midrange (i.e. AS/400, iSeries and System i) computing market. Among the products in their portfolio are Monarch and Visual RPG (AVR), both of which are intended to help customers migrate their RPG assets to the Microsoft .NET platform.

Monarch is a sophisticated suite of applications that helps development teams migrate their RPG programs (or entire applications) to the Microsoft .NET architecture. This migration is more than just a source code conversion. For example, Monarch can translate a typical RPG user interface into ASP.NET web forms.

ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) .NET, is a modern implementation of RPG that enables RPG developers to easily build Web and Windows applications. It integrates RPG development into the Visual Studio environment. This enables RPG developers to take advantage of the full .NET framework, just like their C# and Visual Basic coworkers. AVR provides direct, secure and fast access to both files and program objects on IBM's System i (formerly known as iSeries, AS/400) server.

Using a familiar but modernized syntax, RPG programmers can quickly apply their long-standing RPG experience to create modern applications that connect seamlessly to the System i platform.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit Visual RPG and Monarch.

Find ASNA extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

Vulcan.NET

Vulcan.NET is the next generation of the xBase family of languages. Vulcan.NET provides a high level of backwards-compatibility with the Visual Objects language, while at the same time bringing it into the 21st century with all the features you would expect in a modern programming language. In addition, Vulcan.NET brings all the benefits of the .NET platform to the Visual Objects language, opening up a whole new world of opportunities for xBase programmers.

Vulcan.NET is fully CLS compliant and supports the vast majority of features available to .NET languages, including method and operator overloading, strongly typed arrays, reference and value types, enumeration types, low level pointer operations, and more.

Vulcan.NET is integrated into Visual Studio 2005/2008 with project and file templates, a highly customizable code editor with syntax highlighting, and advanced editing features, a full-featured debugger, a Windows Forms designer, and other tools.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: Yes (Visual Studio 2005/2008)

For more information, visit Go Vulcan.

Find GraFX Software Development extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

C and C++

Accelerate software performance and take advantage of multi-core processors using Intel® compilers. Take advantage of the added capabilities of the Intel® C++ Compiler for Windows from within the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 development environment. The compiler also features source and binary compatibility with the Microsoft C++ compiler.

The New Professional Edition combines a high performance compiler with Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB), Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) and Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL) to create a strong foundation for building robust, high performance parallel code.

Integration:

• .NET integration: No
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit Intel Compilers for Windows.

Visual Fortran

Intel® Visual Fortran Compiler Professional Edition offers the good support for creating multi-threaded applications. Only the Professional Edition offers the breadth of advanced optimization, multi-threading, and processor support that includes automatic processor dispatch, vectorization, auto-parallelization, OpenMP*, data pre-fetching, loop unrolling, substantial Fortran 2003 support, along with an optimized math processing library and Microsoft Visual Studio*.

Developers can now choose between three options, depending on their math processing needs.

Integration:

• .NET integration: No
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit Intel Compilers for Windows.

Find Intel extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

C, C++ and Fortran

The Portland Group offers multi-core, optimizing parallel compilers for C, C++ and FORTRAN. The Portland Group’s focus on multi-core processors makes them the popular choice for companies who value performance and optimization above all else. Typically, these customers are part of the financial services, multi-media and GIS markets.

The Portland Group C++ compiler product is just a command-line compiler and libraries.

Integration:

• .NET integration: No
• Visual Studio integration: No

For more information, visit The Portland Group.

Visual Fortran

The Portland Group offers multi-core, optimizing parallel compilers for C, C++ and FORTRAN. The Portland Group’s focus on multi-core processors makes them the popular choice for companies who value performance and optimization above all else. Typically, these customers are part of the financial services, multi-media and GIS markets.

The Portland Group’s FORTRAN product – Visual Fortran deeply integrates into Visual Studio as a language service. It supports syntax coloring, FORTRAN intrinsic tips and keyword completion and a custom debug engine for providing language specific debugging capabilities.

Integration:

• .NET integration: No
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit Visual Fortran.

VS.Php

VS.Php is a Php IDE (integrated development environment) based on Visual Studio IDE. With VS.Php you can design, develop, debug and deploy Php applications within the Visual Studio IDE. VS.Php key features are around providing rich Php editor as well as Smarty editing capabilities. Also is the ability to debug Php scripts locally as well as remotely.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: No

For more information, visit VS.Php.

Find JCX.Software extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.

IronPython - A CLI implementation of the Python programming language developed by Jim Hugunin at Microsoft.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit the CodePlex IronPython Project.

IronRuby - An upcoming CLI implementation of the Ruby programming language. Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was initially developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto.

Integration:

• .NET integration: Yes
• Visual Studio integration: Yes

For more information, visit the IronRuby site.

Find Microsoft extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery.