IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi Everyone,

I have started working on a new project. This project involves rewriting an application written in assembly language for z/OS. We are writing this application in ANSI C++ (STL included). However to speed up the development process, we are developing the application in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 on Win XP SP2. We are taking every precaution not to use any micorosft specific features in our application (to prevent issues of compilation when the application code is later taken to mainframe).

Is there any way that I can compile my programs on Visual Studio but the compilation actually happens for the mainframe platform, just to be sure that later on there are no issues?

Hello and welcome to the forums,

Is there any way that I can compile my programs on Visual Studio but the compilation actually happens for the mainframe platform

No (not that i'm aware of). The MS Visual Studio environment is completely self-contained (intentioinally) and creates executable for the Win-based environment.

The output of a mainframe compile/assembly is an executable that is mainframe specific.

The closest that i believe you could do fairly easily is to code/test in MS and when you are ready to test on the mainframe, upload the source and re-compile & link on the mainframe.

saurabh.gandhi wrote:Is there any way that I can compile my programs on Visual Studio but the compilation actually happens for the mainframe platform, just to be sure that later on there are no issues?

IBM has a product called RDz (Rational Developer for System z) which does something like this. The development environment (based on Eclipse not Visual Studio) runs on Windows but the compilation is actually done on the mainframe.

Yes - you can use Dignus tools under Visual Studio to do IBM C/C++ compiles.

We have "IBM compatibilty mode", where the compilers accept the IBM C/C++ syntax
and match the IBM generated object. The resulting files can be linked with the IBM LE C/C++
runtime and run just as if the IBM compiler had compiled them. Thus, you can do
your compiles directly under Visual Studio to build your mainframe programs.

We also have plug-ins for RDz.

See http://www.dignus.com