The cloud is a fantastic place to incubate a tech startup. There are zero computing infrastructure costs and setup times are nil. And, of course, the cloud offers true elasticity and scalability. That's why Microsoft is offering $60,000 worth of cloud services to startups through their BizSpark Plus program. Read Full Post
Data centers are huge, power-hungry and inefficient. They consume electricity and IT budgets at staggering rates. HP wants to change that. The company's enterprise server division is developing efficient, compact machinery that's set to shatter our views of the traditional data center. Read Full Post
Alchemy Solutions sent a few of its developers to attend the unveiling of Windows 8 at the 2011 Microsoft BUILD conference in Anaheim California. Read Full Post
I had a recent inquiry into why all the warnings in Fujitsu COBOL and why have them, and how could they turn off warnings in not only COBOL, but in other mixed languages. I guess I go back to moments in my life, when I was warned “don’t do that”, and like any kid, I may have not heeded the advice, to my later dismay. Warnings are really your friend. They may seem overwhelming at times, but they may point out important things in your code, that many times you don’t even know existed. Read Full Post
When new users approach NetCOBOL for .NET and are using embedded SQL in their COBOL code, one question we often get is whether to use ODBC or ADO.NET as the database access mechanism. NetCOBOL for .NET supports both and the good news is that choosing between the two can be as simple as changing configuration settings in your application’s configuration file (usually with the help of the NetCOBOL for .NET provided Runtime Environment Setup Utility). This is because the NetCOBOL compiler and runtime are responsible for handling all the work of translating your embedded SQL queries into calls that are made to the database that you specify. Read Full Post
Have you ever wanted to see what Microsoft SQL Server sees while your application runs? You can log/trace SQL Server events while the NeoData engine interacts with COBOL dynamically converting your ISAM instructionsto SQL Server context. As a matter of fact, all interactions to your SQL Server database, including your ESQL are viewable through the SQL Server Profiler. Read Full Post
Did you know that you can debug the NeoData events that occur while your program is running, by updating your App.Config file that is associated with the Executable/solution or project you are running? This information is valuable in tracing the events that are happening in your COBOL program interacting with NeoData. Read Full Post
Having established in my previous blog what “COBOL runtimes” are, in this blog I’ll consider whether you should pay for COBOL runtime licenses – i.e. the right to ship and use COBOL runtime libraries with your applications. Read Full Post
Are you encountering the situation where you wish that rather than adding references to other projects or DLL’s, in order to bring them into your bin directory, that you could simply specify that all your programs went into the same folder? The simplest way to run applications under .NET is to have them all in the same folder. This typically, while debugging is in the debug\bin folder. This may also mean that you are finding yourself placing other dependant DLL’s in the same folder. One easy solution is to change your Output Path in your project, and other projects that share DLL's. You get there by selecting “Project Properties”, then the “Build” tab, then setting the OutPut Path. Setting the output path to where you keep all your programs, will allow them to be found, as this is the path this Solution/project will run from and expect to find it’s program it needs. Read Full Post
With the release of Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2, the way reports were being done for VS2008 has been changed and such we need to change the way we create our NeoBatch reports. Read Full Post
