SharePoint Designer 2013′s Missing Design View – It’s Official

Well, Keenan Newton did a post on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog entitle Changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013 yesterday that makes it official: the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013 is not just missing, it’s not coming back. I’m reproducing Keenan’s post below, but you should also read it in situ, as the comments are already piling up, and they aren’t positive.

I’m not going to be politic about it: this is going to hurt Microsoft and it’s a horrible decision. The things you may be able to use Design Manager to do and workflows are not what the majority of people use SharePoint Designer for. Code View will do those same people virtually zero good, and there’s no replacement strategy.

Here are some of my specific beefs with the “official” stance that Keenan puts forth.

…we removed the ability to visually edit pages in SharePoint Designer 2013 because its page editor is designed to only understand the unique features of a SharePoint web page.

Exactly! The reason we choose to use SharePoint Designer is *because* it understands ”the unique features of a SharePoint web page”. Nothing else does. For better or worse, SharePoint 2013′s forms, for example, are the same as they have been in 2007 and 2010, based on the List Form Web Part. No other editor knows what that is. SharePoint Designer does.

…any web page designer can now be used for editing web pages in SharePoint Server 2013.

This has always been the case, but who has decided to use Notepad or anything else in the past? We’ve always had the option to copy aspx page content out into some other editor to work on it, and that seems to be what Microsoft is recommending now. SharePoint Designer was and is the only IDE that understands SharePoint’s page structures, controls, and Data Sources. With any other tool, we have to know ourselves how to set up a Data Source in a DVWP or which controls to add to take advantage of SharePoint-specific functionality. In the newly neutered SharePoint Designer, many of the ribbon buttons actually serve no purpose anymore. Things like Conditional Formatting, DVWP formatting options, etc. don’t function unless we write our own code first. On top of that, there is no longer a surface where SharePoint Designer can show us errors in that code. Errors, cryptic or not, have always been shown in the Design (or Split) View. Now we will be flying blind.

To simplify the process of integrating customized SharePoint pages, SharePoint Server 2013 includes a new feature called the SharePoint Design Manager…

Maybe Microsoft believes that the Designer word in SharePoint Designer means that people only use it for design. As you and I know, design is only one small piece of how we use SharePoint Designer. Design Manager also is only useful if you want to apply a design via a master page or page layout to an entire Site Collection that has publishing features enabled. It doesn’t do us any good on individual pages where we want to make small customizations in the design or structure for single-location functionality.

All in all, I’m very disappointed in Microsoft’s decision on this one. As I’ve been telling people, I’ll be fine. As a consultant, I can keep working with SharePoint 2007 and 2010 for a long time and make a decent living at it. I can even learn to work in the Code View exclusively in SharePoint Designer 2013. I’m worried about all of the unsung heroes out there in SharePointland who have been using SharePoint Designer to build solutions that their organizations actually use, rather than what IT typically jams down their throats. Those of us who believe in user empowerment and citizen development have lost a battle this day.