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 ?