Developing Applications with Microsoft Office Developer

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This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

Projects are the building blocks of a Microsoft® Office XP Developer application. If a project is a building block for an application, then a solution is the foundation.

A single solution can contain multiple projects. To manage and monitor your projects and the solution to which they belong, Office Developer contains the Solution Explorer window, which displays the hierarchical structure of a solution and the projects they contain. As in previous versions of Office Developer, you can still manage your projects individually. However, the combination of a solution and the Solution Explorer in the Office Developer architecture facilitates numerous tasks, especially for developers of a multi-project application.

In This Section

  • Creating Projects
    A project consists of separate components that are stored as individual files in an application.
  • Developing Office Applications Using VBA
    Microsoft® Office XP application development is typically the process of customizing an Office application to perform some function or service. Developing an Office application can range from writing a simple Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) procedure to creating a sophisticated financial analysis and reporting application.
  • Developing Workflow Applications for Exchange Server
    Generally, the term "workflow" is used to describe applications that are modeled as business processes. Typical workflow applications include forms routing/approval, document review/publishing, and issue tracking.
  • Developing Workflow Applications for SQL Server
    Simplify the task of creating typical workflow applications, such as forms routing/approval, document review/publishing, and issue tracking, by using the workflow engine and specialized workflow modeling tools of the Workflow Designer of SQL Server.
  • Developing a Digital Dashboard using Web Parts
    A digital dashboard is a container that provides a customized display of information consolidated from various information sources.
  • Developing Office Developer Applications
    Microsoft® Office XP Developer provides the productivity tools professional developers must have to build applications faster, integration tools to make their applications work seamlessly with data and the Web, and management tools to simplify deploying and managing the applications they build with Office.
  • Designing Applications
    It is important for developers to go through the process of planning and design to be able to begin coding with a clear goal in mind.
  • Debugging and Error Handling
    All code contains errors of one kind or another, and how you deal with errors might be the most important part of a well-designed application.
  • Adding Help to Your Custom Application
    Reduce the amount of time required to train and support users of your applications by adding online Help to your Microsoft® Office XP application.
  • Localizing Your Application
    Establishing and implementing localization guidelines can increase the quality, accuracy and user-friendliness of the international product version. Moreover, it can reduce significantly the cost of localizing your application into different languages.
  • Deploying Your Application
    When it is time to deploy your Microsoft® Office XP application to users, you have many alternatives, ranging from copying a file to a common share on a network server to building a full-fledged setup package.