Project manager and NetCOBOL Studio are both development environment tools for developing COBOL applications. Project manager has provided as COBOL development environment tool in NetCOBOL for Windows(x86) from the older version of NetCOBOL for Windows. Now, more companies are using COBOL alongside of JAVA, and the NetCOBOL Studio IDE allows people to choose a more flexible development environment in terms of easily linking in multiple types of objects. And since the NetCOBOL studio is developed in open-source Eclipse, it is a very flexible and extensible development environment.
Note
NetCOBOL Studio is the only allowable development IDE for NetCOBOL for Windows(x64). You cannot use the NetCOBOL Project Manager for development in that environment.
Projects developed in different IDEs use different storage methods; thus, projects are stored in NetCOBOL Project Manager and NetCOBOL Studio with different internal formats. Particularly in NetCOBOL Studio, it is imperative to store projects in a directory structure that exactly matches that shown in the IDE workspace. The same is not true with NetCOBOL Project Manager. When you convert from NetCOBOL Project Manager to NetCOBOL Studio, you will need to handle the differences in how the individual components of the project are actually stored.
Project Manager
The Project Manager is a tool to manage the resources and the compiler options as a project.
The project manager can register two or more targets (dynamic link library (.DLL) or executable file (.EXE)) in one project file. And the place of the managed resource files can be flexibility decided.
NetCOBOL Studio
Based on Eclipse, an open-source integrated development environment, the COBOL development environment includes assist functions for COBOL program development. In NetCOBOL Studio, folders called Projects are used for creating target files, and managing necessary information such as resources and compile options. It is necessary to configure COBOL source files and target files in the project folder. In addition, it is necessary to create or import a project in the user's workspace in NetCOBOL Studio.
