Bug Report: debugging issues

[BlackKnight]

Today I launched my first debugging session with Visual COBOL and recognized a number of errors. I took a screen recording of my session. Please find the screen recording attached along with the project file in the attachment.

The errors I recognized and recorded are (briefly):

1. Text capitalization fails to be read correctly from option settings occasionally.
2. Debugger value tool-tips are displayed for literals.
3. Debugger value tool-tips result in errors.

[Chris Glazier]

What product version and Patch Update level are you using?

I am testing with Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2019 V5.0 PU7 and I cannot seem to reproduce your reported errors 1 and 3 below.

Note that if you are currently on maintenance with Micro Focus, this Community forum is not a replacement for regular support channels. If you run into a product bug or have an enhancement request then you should open up a Support Incident with Customer Support so that we can document, investigate and track your issue properly.

Thanks.

[BlackKnight]

Hi Chris,

thank you for your reply.

Micro Focus support directed me here after I sent them my reports: "Thank you for the update. Support for Visual COBOL for Visual Studio Personal Edition is done separately via community website , you can refer the link https://community.microfocus.com/. You can find discussion forums and articles about your products here. You can also ‘Join’ the community to post your questions and a specialist engineer will monitor your requests and get back to you. Kind regards, SupportLine"

I don't feel this an ideal situation, too. I guess it's probably based on the fact that I'm using an evaluation license yet.

I am, indeed, evaluating the Visual COBOL extension at this time to see if it's worth buying or if I'm better off using GT Software's NetCOBOL. So, I feel it's just fair to share my obvervations with the development team so they have a chance of improving/fixing their extension meanwhile. It's up to them to pick up the ball and run.

But back to my issue:

This week I set-up a clean VM with the latest Visual Studio 2019 Enterprise edition and installed the latest Visual COBOL extension from the Micro Focus website (being called Version 5, Update 2).

I added a version information file containing the version information of VS 2019 and all installed extensions (being only Microsoft VS 2019 built-in extensions and Visual COBOL).

Do you belive this information may shed any light on the issue?

[Chris Glazier]

Visual COBOL Personal Edition is not the correct product for doing an evaluation or a POC. The VCPE is a free product which is for students to learn COBOL and it limits source files to 2200 lines each and the only support you get is through this forum here.

You should really be using an evaluation copy of the product which will provide you with full product functionality and you will also get access to Customer Support which means that you can download the latest Patch Updates to the product and make official bug reports and feature requests. You can get an evaluation copy by contacting your Account Representative or at the link here.

Our next major release is V6.0 and is due to be GA in a couple months. Some of the features that you are requesting have already been addressed in 6.0.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and we will review all of the suggestions that you are making for possible inclusion in future versions.

So that you are using the latest Patch Update to Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2019 in your testing I have placed Patch Update 7 onto our ftp site and it can be downloaded here:

Thanks.

[BlackKnight]

Thanks a lot, Chris, you are a great help and aid!! 👍👍👍

I didn't realize yet that the Personal Edition is for free. The sales representative (Vigya) who's supposed to contact me didn't reply to me for the last couple of days, so I'm still waiting for his offer.

Up until now I wasn't successful in finding online a comparison of different Visual COBOL editions and their corresponding prices. I would be looking for the smallest edition, though, as I'm a software freelancer, just trying to learn the language now, yet later supposed to utilize my customers' software infrastructure.

Today, I downloaded the update you kindly provided and I'm going to check that new version during the next few days. And I'm going to report, of course.

For now, have a very nice and healthy week!
Axel

[BlackKnight]

Hi Chris,

I just tested with the new update. Same situation. Particularly in regard to the faulty debugger output (see image attached).

The Micro Focus version reported now is 5.0.00077.

[Chris Glazier · Accepted solution]

I am now able to reproduce this problem while debugging .NET code and I have opened up a bug report for it and passed it on to Development.

Thank you.

[Ted John]

Thank you for the bug report. This has now been fixed, just in time for our upcoming 6.0 release.

[BlackKnight]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to solve this issue in such near time frame! 👍

Just to make sure: Did all three issues I reported have been solved, including the first one about incorrect text casing?

Currently, everytime I open Visual Studio 2019 I have to visit the Tools > Options > Text Editor > Micro Focus COBOL > Text Casing dialog first, before I can start working to have IntelliSense suggest reserved words in upper case.