Microsoft Azure System Requirements and Levels of Support

System requirements

See Additional Software Requirements for details about prerequisite software for using Visual COBOL with Microsoft Azure and for the exact supported version of the Microsoft Azure SDK.

Also see Restrictions in Azure Support for information about developing COBOL applications for Azure in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

If any future versions of the Microsoft Azure SDK are made available before the next major release of Visual COBOL, Micro Focus will deliver support for these only upon customers' requests.

Upgrading existing COBOL Azure projects

The Microsoft Azure SDK supported in this release of Visual COBOL might not support features available in previous versions of the SDK. This means COBOL Azure projects created with earlier versions of Visual COBOL must be upgraded to the supported version of the SDK.

The following step outline how to upgrade existing COBOL Azure projects to this version of Visual COBOL:

1. Open your existing solution in Visual Studio.

   You receive a notification that the projects are associated with an earlier version of Microsoft Azure.

2. Choose the option to convert the projects to target the version of Microsoft Azure Tools supported by this release of Visual COBOL and click OK.

   This converts your projects to the latest project format and loads them in Solution Explorer.

3. Update the project references in your solution as follows:
   1. Remove all references to the specific version of the Azure assemblies for which the projects were originally created.
   2. For the projects for which you removed referenced assemblies, add project references to the relevant Microsoft Azure assemblies using the Add Reference context menu command from Solution Explorer. Click Extensions and use this to add the required assemblies.

   Alternatively, instead of updating the project references, you can remove the existing Web and Worker roles from your solution and create new ones using the latest Microsoft Azure SDK.

For more information about the changes in the Microsoft Azure SDK since previous versions and for features that are no longer supported, check Microsoft's documentation on Azure.

Restrictions

The following are currently not supported for COBOL applications:

• Native code
• Microsoft Azure Platform Appliance, which is a turnkey cloud platform that you can deploy in your own data center

Hints and Tips

• You need to run Visual Studio with elevated permissions (administrator mode).
• You use the compute emulator to debug your service locally before publishing to Microsoft Azure.