Sorry but Visual COBOL 2.3 is not compatible with Visual Studio Express but it is compatible with both the Visual Studio Shell for VS 2012 or VS 2013 or for the VS 2015 Community Edition.
If you are installing either the Visual COBOL for VS2012 or VS2013 product and do not already have a full version of Visual Studio installed on your computer then the appropriate Shell version will automatically be installed prior to installing Visual COBOL,
If you are installing the Visual COBOL for VS2015 product then you will first need to download and install the Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition from Microsoft which can be found here: Then you can run the installer for VC VS2015.
Thanks