Calling COBOL from .NET

There are three ways to call and interact with an ACUCOBOL-GT program from a .NET assembly. You can:

• Use ACUCOBOL-GT's .NET compiler options to package your ACUCOBOL-GT program as a .NET assembly. .NET programmers can then invoke these objects as they would any other .NET assembly.

  Though perhaps easiest, this option limits data passing as discussed in Using the .NET MSIL Compiler Options.

  Note:

  To use the .NET compiler options, you must have Microsoft .NET Development Framework Version 2.0. However, you can create Version 1.1 and 2.0 assemblies.

• Use our .NET interface assembly, "wrunnet.dl". This gives .NET programmers more direct access to and control of the ACUCOBOL-GT Windows runtime module. "wrunnet.dll" contains a singleton class, CVM, that encapsulates the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime. With the CVM, the .NET programmer can programmatically instantiate the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime and invoke a COBOL program without a COM interface or knowledge of the Windows API or .NET PINVOKE.

  .NET programmers can include "wrunnet.dll" in a Visual Studio .NET project and take advantage of the native .NET development environment. This interface gives them lower-level control over the COBOL program, and is very similar to the ACUCOBOL-GT C and Java interfaces.

• Use ACUCOBOL-GT's COM server technology. The COM server is a COM object containing the ACUCOBOL-GT Windows runtime DLL. When the COM server is added to a .NET project, a proxy is created to communicate with the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime. The proxy provides all interface and data marshalling between .NET and the COM server. (Marshalling is the process of gathering data and transforming it into a standard format before transmitting it over a network.)