Micro Focus Net Express Personal Edition is a legacy, Windows-based COBOL development environment designed for learning, evaluation, and non-commercial use. It combines an IDE with a COBOL compiler, project management, and the Animator debugger, supporting both procedural and object-oriented COBOL. Typical capabilities include building Win32 desktop applications, creating simple GUIs (via Dialog System), integrating with COM/ActiveX components, accessing databases through ODBC, and interoperating with C/C++ libraries.
The Personal Edition imposes licensing and runtime restrictions: it is not intended for production deployment, executables are generally limited to the local machine, and they may display a runtime banner. It was commonly used for education, prototyping, and maintaining COBOL code on Windows without requiring mainframe infrastructure.
As a legacy product, Net Express Personal Edition has largely been superseded by newer tooling (such as Visual COBOL). Compatibility and support may be limited, and it often runs best on older versions of Windows or with compatibility settings.
Micro Focus Net Express Personal Edition is developed by Micro Focus. The most popular version of this product among our users is 5.0.
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