Visual COBOL for 2010 visual studio

Question

Hi,

I just installed trail version of Visual COBOL with visual studio 2010 from Micro Focus. I am trying to compile one of my old COBOL programs into .NET assembly. When I compile, it creates .IDY file exension file in the bin floder. I want to decompile assembly to C# code. Is there anyway I can do this?

Thanks..

Answer 1

Try renaming it to *.dll, and load it into Reflector. If that fails, MicroFocus is doing something funky and that's not a .NEt assembly. This is probably not unreasonable. The .IDY file could be some form of pcode, which is interpreted by some runtime (that is real .NET code)

Answer 2

The .idy file contains data for debugging, so using reflector on it will not work just like reflector does not work on .pdb files.

Answer 3

[Note: post from Micro Focus]

As the previous poster noted, the IDY file is only used to support the debugger.

If this is a managed code project (and you can create both managed and unmanaged (native) code in VS 2010 with Visual COBOL), then you will the assemblies in standard MSIL just like any other .NET language. Bear in mind this is not code that's intended to be human-readable and depends on the Micro Focus COBOL runtime so you can't reverse engineer the code to some other language such as C# (there may also be license agreement issues).