SharePoint Designer vs Visual Studio

Microsoft provides few tools for users to further enhance and extend the MOSS alraedy-powerful capabilities to suite the small, medium and even enterprise business requirements, especially workflow and features. We have SharePoint Designer 2007, formerly known as Frontpage 2003 as initial entry tool for customization and Visual Studio Extension for WSS for advance customization.

I was assigned with a task. The task is to allow certain fields in a custom list in a subsite, to have the value auto-generated based on the entered name, plus to hide those fields when creating New Item.

For fastest result with minimum effort, I decided to use SPD for this task. I specifically love the Workflow Designer in SPD.

• I designed a workflow, to be executed when a new item is created to auto-generate the values using Build Dynamic String action.
• To hide the field when new item was created, I modified NewItem.aspx form, removed the ListForm webpart and add in custom list form and it work flawlessly within 15 minutes.

I tried to accomplish the same task using VS and it took me 2 days until I figured out how to properly deploy a Custom Definition with the custom fields visible in the new item and edit item form.

When to use SPD ?

• Fast result, minimum effort situation like proof-of-concept, demo to impress the clients !
• Train the trainer basis project in which power users are educated to self-sufficient
• Layout and user interface design
• Site specific customizations
  

When to use VS ?

• Customization involves multiple sites deployment
• Component-like generic workflow, to allow flexible configuration and cross list implementation
• Event-driven customization
• other things that SPD accomplish or too tedious to perform

In short, SPD seems like the primary choice for both power users and developers. Why ? Cause when I faced problem with that feature development, I can rarely google any info from the internet. So, my assumption is most implementations are happy with SPD. Still, VS will be the ultimate tool to compliment the shortcomings that SPD post.

Guess I will have to learn both of the tools to become a real SharePoint sensei ?

fine-grained permission - "user problem"

One of the shortcomings that SPS2003 had is the lack of item-level permission. Customers always fussed about that limitation but still, it served as one of the best selling point to push the customers to upgrade to the new MOSS 2007.

This powerful add-on capability in MOSS 2007 yet, confused a lot of people including myself. I created a folder and a subfolder, breaking the permission relationship in between. I removed the access group #1 from the folder and to my surprised, access group #1 was removed from subfolder as well although the realtionship was broken ! Hail, it seem like the fine-grained permission was so buggy.

I posted a new thread in MSDN forum. No reply for the past few days. I searched in the google and cannot get any hints or tips as well. The rule of the thumb is, if no one except you got this problem, it's a typical "user-problem". And, really, I finally found explantion to that.

Guess there's a lot of people was laughing when saw my thread at MSDN. Sorry, "user problem" again

first encounter

It's year 2004 when I first heard the term "SharePoint" during a proof-of-concept for a big potential client. It's a competition among us with another solution vendor to bid for the project. I was told, we were losing the deal as "SharePoint" was just too difficult to be beaten in that particular tender.

We did our best. We setup a production-like environment. 4 big boxes of enourmous servers, days of hardworks and sweat to get the environment up and yet, we lose. I was shocked when I heard the other vendor uses 1 laptop setup the proof-of-concept. Compare to ours, it's like constructing a mammoth tank to compete with an ultimate light saber and our mammoth tank was crushed. It's a difficult battle but it served as a valuable experience for me.

Months later, it was faith that I was assigned to a project: SharePoint implementation for another big, real big customer. That's SharePoint Portal Server 2003 that time and I started my journey to dive into SharePoint.