Developing Office Developer Applications

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This content is no longer actively maintained.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.

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 Microsoft Office.

To develop applications using Office Developer

  1. Design your application before starting. Numerous considerations make application development much easier if they are addressed from the start — for example, choosing a data store, security, and schema. For more information, see Designing Applications.
  2. Create an Office Developer project and develop your application. Workflow applications and dashboard projects are created using the Microsoft development environment. Applications using Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) are created using the Visual Basic Editor in the Office application you are using. For more information, see Developing Applications with Microsoft Office Developer.
  3. Debug your code and create errors handlers. Successfully debugging code is more of an art than a science. The best results come from writing understandable and maintainable code and using the available debugging tools. Writing good error handlers is a matter of anticipating problems or conditions that are beyond your immediate control and that will prevent your code from executing correctly at run time. For more information, see Debugging and Error Handling.
  4. Add online Help to your application to reduce the amount of time required to train and support users. For more information, see Adding Help to Your Custom Application.
  5. Localize your application, adapting it for countries or parts of the world in which it will be used. You must translate the strings in the user interface, and it might involve changing the application itself where necessary. For more information, see Localizing Your Application.
  6. Deploy your application with one of the many alternatives, ranging from copying a file to a common share on a network server to building a full-fledged setup program. How you choose to deploy the application depends largely on what type of application you have created. For more information, see Deploying Your Application.

See Also

Getting Started with Office Developer | Using Web Technologies with Office XP | Programming Concepts