Designing Applications

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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. Spending a few hours up front on design can mean the difference between delivering the application that customers must have a few months down the road or backtracking to try to convert many hours of coding work into the application that should have been designed in the first place.

In This Section

• The Design Process
  Identify your customers and their wants and requirements before you begin designing an application.
• Which Technologies Should You Use?
  Determine the type of application you want to create and which application or technologies to use as the basis for your application.
• Thinking About User Interface Design
  Understand how an effective user interface is an important aspect to application design.
• Designing Code for Reusability
  Maximize the reusability of your code by spending some time thinking about how to structure your code within the application.
• Security Considerations
  Protect your intellectual property by securing your code and protect your application from viruses and unwelcome users.
• Testing Your Application
  Test your code to make sure that each part of the application works as expected.
• Application Deployment
  After you develop an application, you can distribute it to users.

Related Sections

• 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 Microsoft Office.
• 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 application.
• Deploying Your Application
  Understanding how you choose to deploy the application depends largely on what type of application you have created.