MSDN Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 79) B a s h a r “B a s h” B a d a w i Interop Connect To Mainframe Apps With BizTalk Adapters And .NET magine you were a bank CEO back in the 1970s. Your customer base was growing rapidly, and keeping paper records was proving to be an expensive and a risky business. Where could you go to automate record-keeping? What were your options for more efficient storage? As it turned out, most such organizations invested in mainframes or minicomputers, such as the AS/400 and VAX systems—and it was on these systems that many programmers learned their trade. Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), which was originally developed in 1959, became the dominant development language on these systems. You might be surprised to know that COBOL is still a common language for business apps. According to a 2001 Gartner report on enterprise programming language adoption, more than 60 percent of the businesses surveyed still used COBOL. Almost every major industry relies on COBOL. Most companies that use mainframe systems for business-critical applications and data storage have continued investing in COBOL development—and probably will do so even after migrating away from mainframes. As recently as 2006, the New York Stock Exchange had moved its stock options clearing and billing systems to Windows®-based servers, but continued running its COBOL applications in recompiled form. In the early days, mainframe connectivity was limited to terminals connected via coaxial cable to a controller that was, in turn, connected to a front-end processor (FEP), much like current networks. The network protocol was typically SNA (System Network Architecture), though mainframes later came to support TCP/IP as well. Another popular choice for wire-level connectivity was IPDLC and High Performance Routing. The original design of SNA did not support routing, so special routing hardware or software was used to deliver the packets to the FEP. Since many COBOL applications were SNA protocol-specific, IP-DLC was developed as an alternative in which IP is the main carrier and SNA is somewhat encapsulated within it. Within SNA there are sub-protocols based on the concept of a This article uses the following technologies: BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server, .NET Framework 2.0 This article discusses: Connecting to a host system Exposing COBOL apps as endpoints ✥ .NET Framework integration ✥ Terminal screen-scraping ✥ ✥ Bashar “Bash” Badawi has 20 years of IT experience in developing Microsoft-based solutions and consulting. Bash is currently a Senior Program Manager with the BizTalk/Host Integration Server group based in the field helping customers and partners understand and implement enterprise solutions. december2007 79
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