Installing Visual COBOL into Visual Studio

Visual Studio is offered in different editions, Professional, Enterprise or Community Edition, that can all co-exist on the same machine. When you install Visual COBOL, its setup file installs it into any edition of Visual Studio installed on the machine, including Preview versions.

If, after Visual COBOL is installed, you install a different edition of Visual Studio, you can use the MFVSIXINSTALL utility (available in the Visual COBOL installation directory) to plug Visual COBOL into that edition.

MFVSIXINSTALL

To install Visual COBOL in all editions of the Visual Studio version that you target:

  1. Locate MFVSIXInstall.exe in %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Micro Focus\Visual COBOL\vsix, and in the VS17.0 subfolder.
  2. Run MFVSIXInstall.exe.

    This starts the VSIX Installer utility that will install all the required components into the existing editions of the Visual Studio version that you target.

  3. Click Modify in the VSIX Installer dialog box to start the installation.
  4. Click Close when the installation is completed.

You can execute MFVSIXInstall.exe from the command line with different parameters. For example, to uninstall Visual COBOL from all editions of Visual Studio, execute MFVSIXInstall -u.

For a list of all parameters execute MFVSIXInstall -?.

Troubleshooting Visual COBOL installations

You can use the MFVSIXInstall utility to troubleshoot and fix any issues with plugging Visual COBOL into Visual Studio.

If after installing Visual COBOL there appears to be no Visual COBOL support in Visual Studio, run the MFVSIXInstall utility as described earlier. The utility provides information about any issues that were found and will, in most cases, fix the Visual COBOL integration.

In some cases, an issue with the Visual COBOL installation might be caused by an issue with Visual Studio setup itself. You need to run the Visual Studio installer that will report any potential problems and enable you to either repair, modify or uninstall the IDE. If the installer reports any issues, check the following for more details: