That title ("Visual Studio COBOL") reminded me of the less-serious "Cobol on Cogs" site: <a href="http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM" rel="nofollow">http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM</a>
Here's a word i haven't heard in a long time...
In those days we chose to learn Clipper over Cobol, each CL would take 2-3 minutes to compile on a 8086 processor. Now it takes less than 1 sec to do it, lol
While this might make the actual process of typing in the code easier, it doesn't make the language any better. I still can't imagine choosing to use COBOL over using Ruby or even C#.