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Saturday, October 2, 2010

SharePoint Designer 2010: Crash frequently, not a product for public release

I can remember the old days of using SharePoint Designer 2007. SharePoint Designer 2007 used to crash so frequently that before pressing Ctrl + S  (for saving content) in SharePoint designer I prayed to God not to crash the designer. I can still fell the pain and danger I used to face in those old days. I couldn’t understand how a public released product can crash so frequently! Even a beta product can’t be that much unstable nowadays. However SharePoint designer 2007 was made a bit stable later with service pack releases.

SharePoint 2010 is out there for few months and people are rushing for it (as it seems). My expectation was not to face the same buggy designer this time. But I’m disappointed and frustrated as like others who have experience the same problems. I’ve been using SharePoint Designer for few weeks and I’ve found it’s crashing  frequently (but not that much as was in first release of of Designer 2007). And the most interesting is that there’s no error reporting option in SharePoint Designer. It just crashes and when I open the designer again it opens as it nothing unusual happened before.

Since there’s no alternative to SharePoint designer, so we are bound to use the designer risking the chance of losing the content and valuable time. We don’t expect this to be happen again and again.There’s lot of reports on SP designer crash on web. We SharePoint community expect reasonable steps from SharePoint team to resolve the issue. Now either Microsoft can make the project open source or they can fix it by themselves. When it continue crashing again and again It seems like the product was developed by some fresh university students for their final year projects.

 

Working with SharePoint Designer is too much frustrating, disgusting experience. SharePoint designer should be part of SharePoint but it seems SharePoint Team doesn’t think like that way. They always care less about SharePoint designer than the original product and getting less care from the team SharePoint designer becomes a playing tools that can be used to demonstrate how a product can be crashed shamelessly. SharePoint Designer is less cared by-product from SharePoint team. But SharePoint Team should know, the designer is the product that can be used to edit content in SharePoint and we are using SharePoint Designer to add/edit enterprise content not some testing stuffs. So I loose my contents or my contents get distorted then they are responsible for this.

6 comments:

  1. A further 20% of the organizations bespoke needs can be customized by the SharePoint Designer. The customisations performed by this individual are changes that cannot be done through the SharePoint user interface i.e. the site actions button. Once the Super User has exhausted all possibilities through the site actions button the SharePoint Designer comes in.
    SharePoint Consulting

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  2. And the 20% using SharePoint designer are victims of the buggy product. This is very frustrating Hanry..

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  3. I would say that 20% of the business software that Microsoft sells is actually fit for use. It's amazing how many businesses are lining up to buy microsoft's garbage and become basically alpha-testers that are still paying hefty licence fees. I use sharepoint, IIS, and SQL server, and I keep it very simple, or there is no way to recover lost data.

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  4. I cant agree more. With SharePoint Designer 2010, I'm experiencing a MOUNTAIN of crashes. This software product should be an embarrassment to the SharePoint development team. And I agree with you...open source the thing so REAL developers can fix it since its non-revenue generating for Microsoft!

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  5. I'm always having problems with SharePoint Designer, when I save sometimes it decides to crash and therefore all of my recent changes I made to my stylesheet is missing. It's so difficult to get any further with SharePoint with Designer crashing all of the time.

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  6. I very much agree with the comments made here. Such a shame you are not paying enough attention to the product or bite the bullet and put it in VS once and for all!

    I am sometimes dreaming of a "cross between SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010".
    Very often, very tempted to design my own editor... but this would take a while.

    The SPD development approach is great for so many reasons and can be so fast even for live scenarios. I do not understand people saying you shouldn't use SPD on a live environment. HTML, CSS, jQuery and XSLT do absolute wonders if you're good enough. 80% of the time there is no need for C# and cumbersome development/deployment/solution packaging, etc.

    BUT...

    - I want SPD to stop editing my code when I don't want it to
    - I want good intellisense working for all languages on the page (ref. VS 2010)
    - I don't want it to crash every time I save
    - I want XSLT debugging facilities. I repeat... I want XSLT debugging facilities!!!
    - I want code view and design view to be usable and fast (ref. VS 2010)
    - I don't want empty lines to be added to my code
    - I want the ability to move my code to another environment (dev/staging/prod) easily
    - Stop using GUIDs of lists but start with "Names", much more user friendly and deployable

    I basically should be your "Product Manager" cause I know what you need to improve!

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