Looking at the possibility of moving our mainframe based Gen applications off to a Microsoft .NET based platform, still using Gen. Not too worried about the Gen code base. The online part of the applications don't seem like they will be much of an issue because they can be regenerated as C# servers and re-deployed. The batch environment is a different story and these applications are batch heavy. I know that the programs themselves can be regenerated to C# but we're struggling to find a way to replicate the items which are inherent on the mainframe in the Windows world. The biggest hurdle I'm finding is the file management. We have Windows based scheduling software. I think we can port the JCL into Windows scripts somehow. We have a lot of home grown SAS utility programs and SAS exists in the Windows world. We use Report Composer for reporting and sequential file reading and writing and we can also regenerate that code for Windows. What I'm not finding is a good replacement for the Generation Data Group concept that makes file management so easy on the Mainframe.
If anyone has successfully completed a platform rehosting project and would like to share any tools you've used and lessons learned, I'd love to hear about your experience.
Thanks