info about office developer

[dakota81]

I need to get one of the developer editions of Office so I can package up an Access application. I want to try and get some information here before I spend a lot of money on the software.

First, I do not believe I want the Office 2003 dev tools because the application I package cannot be run under Windows 98.

For Office XP Developer I could spend the full amount and get the full retail version but I want to find out if I can do this cheaper. Basically, I came across this item, which is an add-on cd that puts the developer tools onto Office XP.

http://www.trustprice.com/as/product_details.cfm/ItemNo=MS-OXPD-DT/OrderBy=ItemNo

Two questions:
1) Does this look like a good way to do this? I want what I do to be completely legal, though I see a $500 difference in price, which would be a huge advantage for me.

2) Could this be placed over Access 2002? Meaning I do have a full retail copy of just Access 2002, but not the full Office XP Pro suite.


There's very little information I'm finding out on the web, so if anyone here could help me out, I would be very appreciative.

 

[fredericofonseca]

Search these forums for

access runtime

and you will find some info relating distributing Access applications.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[dakota81]

I searched "access runtime" and there's far too many topics to sort through, and what I could look at there wasn't anything pertaining to my questions. Tek-tips let me view the first 100 search results which went back to only mid september.

So if anyone here knows the answers to the questions I have, I would be very appreciative.

 

[fredericofonseca]

Well I did find a few that contained a few pointers.

What are you trying to do exactly?
Distribute the application within your company or outside?
have you looked at saving the MDB as .MDE or .ADE? Would this be enough for you?

If making your application public you may wish to consider moving it to VB + MSDE instead of Access.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[lupins46]

I have no idea whether the product you refer to is legal or not.
But NFR would mean 'Not for Resale'.

If you developing an application on your own and are hoping to distribute it to 'unknown' customers using the Access runtime then you need to think at least twice about this.
The runtime can work well in an environment where you have total control over the user's pc config, but it's very hit and miss if you don't know the target machine, and indeed can damage the setup of that machine if Access is already installed.

 

[dakota81]

I've found on Microsoft's site that Office '97 Pro is a qualifying product for Office XP Developer Upgrade so I'll be purchasing that if I go this route.

I'm not familiar with ".ade" files.

We want to distribute an application I wrote and not force the users to purchase a separate copy of Access when it is much cheaper for us to buy the single developer edition.

Is it easy to work with VB & MSDE? I've never done any larger scale programming work before, I've only worked within MS Access or Coldfusion on the web. If there's a better way to do what I want, I am all for doing what I need to do for this application, I just don't have anyone around me here that has done any work like this, I'm figuring it out as I go by searching the internet.

The application I have is pretty basic compared to what can be done within Access, I just import data from an Excel spreadsheet, run a couple sql queries against the data, and tranform it all into a report. Nothing big, but is a much more automated procedure than what we have to do to generate the same reports within Excel.

 

[fredericofonseca]

MSDE is a version of SQL Server without the Admin tools and with a limit of 25 users (more will cause the DB to slow down. See microsoft.com for more info).

Moving from Access to VB will probably be easy based on what you have said.

I would get a "evaluation" copy of VB, play around with changing what you have to VB (you can still keep the .MDB database), and see what work is involved. The report itself may be the worst to convert to VB, but not necessarily. Really depends on what you have.

as for .mde/.ade once again search Microsoft.com &

http://www.deja.com

for info. I don't use then, but I have seen a few applications with them. Main thing there is that all code is compiled and removed from the .mde/ade files.

VB+MSDE.
Normal VB programming, use ADO to access the SQL (MSDE) DB, rest is standard T-SQL.

If you have office PRO (2003, maybe before) you will have MSDE on the CD.





Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[number2]

Regarding distribution of an Access db to outside users:

I offer the user the CHOICE of installing the db with runtime of without runtime. In otherwords, IF the user has Access already installed, they should select installation of the db ONLY. If they do not have Access installed, they select "Install with Access Runtime".

I have distributed like this for about 2 years. There are of course problems from time to time, but re-writing a large db to another format is cost prohibitive for many small customer base applications.

To help with this, I offer the user a demo version. It installs and runs just like the non demo version. If the demo runs, the full version will run. I see it as an insurance policy protecting me from users who purchase the full version and have difficulty.

I hope this helps!