COBOL to C# Transformation

Migrating COBOL to C#

This white paper explores the key business drivers for making the step from COBOL to C#, and how our CodeTurn tool makes this transition possible. It explains the added value that Astadia migration offers over other approaches and demystifies the migration process.

For a more extensive documentation on the way COBOL can be transformed into working, maintainable C#, please request our Research Paper here.

Why Migrate from COBOL to C#?

There are many good reasons to make the move to C# from COBOL, but the following are the largest concerns for businesses today:

• High (and rising) maintenance and runtime fees for the existing COBOL products
• Shrinking availability of COBOL developers and lack of interest in COBOL from young developers
• End-of-life scenarios for certain COBOL technologies
• Lack of application extensibility and interoperability with other, non-COBOL applications

C# offers answers to all of the above concerns:

• Support fees are negligible when compared to COBOL.
• C# is among the most widely-used programming languages today, and is a standard part of the IT lesson package of many schools. Documentation of the language, software libraries, and development tools are also widely available.
• C# and .NET are actively being developed by Microsoft and the product and its documentation are publicly available on the Internet (earlier versions were also official ISO/IEC and ECMA standards)
• Interoperability with all Microsoft platforms and technologies is a given and portability to other platforms is being actively developed by Microsoft in the form of .NET Core(3); the Mono(4) project also provides cross-platform capabilities

Next to that, moving to C# also means:

• Enabling the use of state-of-the-art IDEs, with extensive debugging, refactoring, profiling and (unit)testing support
• Enabling the use of thousands of third-party libraries, covering almost all imaginable computing needs:  UI development, database interaction, mail/ftp/http/… communication, parsing, xml processing
• Enabling the use of modern application architectures (multi-tier, SOA or micro-service based) and deployment techniques (cloud, docker)

Get a copy of our white paper and contact our team to learn more.