Author Archives: spgennard

TechEd 2009 – Keynote with Jazon and Mark

Posted on November 12, 2009 by spgennard

My boss (Mark Conway) the other day was lucky enough to demonstrate some of the wonders of next release at TechEd 2009 in the keynote with Jazon Zander’s entitled: “Visual Studio 2010: New Challenges, New Solutions” The demo shows off … Continue reading →

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Too Iterate or not…

Posted on November 10, 2009 by spgennard

Over the next couple of weeks, I will explore some of the reasons why I think managed environments are good for COBOL. So.. lets the show on the road… Setting up arrays/occurs items in COBOL and manipulating them can be … Continue reading →

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Fiddling with the JVM

Posted on November 9, 2009 by spgennard

Java is a very safe language if used in a normal way, however just like the CLR it can be used in an unsafe manor. The main reason for using Java in a unsafe manor is performance, some unsafe operations … Continue reading →

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NUnit and COBOL.Net

Posted on November 6, 2009 by spgennard

A while back, I spent a afternoon converting some C# NUnit documentation into COBOL .Net, so I thought I would share the document with the world, with the hope that it will help any one interested in using NUnit and … Continue reading →

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Visual Debugger – Animator

Posted on November 5, 2009 by spgennard

This is a very old advertisement of our (Micro Focus) first COBOL debugger called animator in all its glory debugging the classic sample of the day pi.cbl, which calculates the value of PI. So why is so good? To put … Continue reading →

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Object COBOL/Java default exception handler

Posted on November 3, 2009 by spgennard

While working on some support recently for our compiler (Micro Focus COBOL compiler that is), I became annoyed with the lack of a reasonable error messages/stack trace output from our Java/COBOL Object support. I have no idea why our default … Continue reading →

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Cheap Mobile phone tip for use in Spain

Posted on October 30, 2009 by spgennard

While visiting Spain/Madrid my partner finally managed to get a pay-as-you mobile that she could charge without requiring a spanish credit card, which never of us have, as we live in the UK. Anyway, the mobile just cost €20 from … Continue reading →

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TomTom Xl Live and missing traffic updates

Posted on October 28, 2009 by spgennard

We recently move from our trust TomTom One to the wizzy TomTom XL Live. Unfortunately some where in the update process, the TomTom live was only part activated…. basically the TomTom traffic update kept complaining the account did not have … Continue reading →

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Online language translation services for your website

Posted on October 27, 2009 by spgennard

Hi, While creating this website I looked at various widgets for translating the webpages on the fly… none of them were as easy to use as googles… so…  If you are lazy but still want people from with other countries … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, iWeb | 2 Comments

C# and reserved words

Posted on October 23, 2009 by spgennard

Have you ever wanted to create some real nasty code in C#… Well C# has a mechanism that allows a token to be used as a literal, thus avoiding the reserved word clash issues… For example; int @int = 1; … Continue reading →

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