Differences between Enterprise Developer and Net Express and Mainframe Express

All references to Net Express and Server Express in this guide relate to the variants of those products that provided Mainframe Subsystem Support as part of the Studio Enterprise Edition bundle.

This guide lists the differences between Net Express, Mainframe Express and Enterprise Developer in the following areas:

Compiling and building

Having created a project in Enterprise Developer, you can either use the IDE or the command line to build.

Run-time systems

There are some differences between the run-time systems supplied with Enterprise Developer and those supplied with Net Express and Mainframe Express. This, however, will not affect your existing applications and they will continue to run under Enterprise Developer - you only need to recompile the applications from the source code with Enterprise Developer.

Run-time system technologies

Some technologies behave differently and require some upgrade work.

Restrictions and unsupported features

Some features of Net Express and Mainframe Express are not available in Enterprise Developer. However, there are alternative techniques for many of these features.

Editing and debugging

Much of the Net Express and Mainframe Express functionality for editing and debugging is available in Enterprise Developer, but sometimes with a different name and with a slightly different behavior. In addition there are some new features such as background parsing, which highlights errors as you type and code completion techniques that provide easy access to language elements, enabling you to select and insert them simply.

Visual Studio integration

Enterprise Developer is integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio, which provides the functionality to manage projects and debug applications. You can compile your COBOL to native or .NET COBOL code.

Applications previously built in Net Express or Mainframe Express can be developed and run within the Visual Studio IDE.