SharePoint Designer is POO!!! or sh*t, awful, crap, pants, annoying, badly-designed... basically a developer's nightmare!

Hi All,

It's been a while and I really feel like I have to shout about something today!

Hello my name is Etienne, I'm a hardcore SharePoint developer and have been for now 8 years. Just to say that I am starting to know my way around MOSS...

One thing that hasn't changed though is SharePoint Designer (aka SPD), the "tool" that is supposed to help you do stuff in MOSS 2007 (it was also called SharePoint Designer in 2003 and it's ancestor was FrontPage... have you ever seen/used FrontPage to do web development? If yes you will definitely know what I mean by "POO")

SharePoint Designer is an absolute pile of sh*t in terms of interface and SOOOOO annoying to use because it:

1. Has very poor interface goodies unlike his big brother Visual Studio (which is awesome BTW as every .NET/SilverLight/SQL developer knows)
2. Times out all the time (when it works)
   
3. Tries to mess with your code and really "uglyfies" it
4. Gives you errors constently for no reason
   
5. Can REALLY break your SharePoint Site if you haven't been properly trained
   
6. Extremely unintuitive whether you're a Monkey or a Genius
7. ... and so much more I'm afraid!

The real problem is that without SharePoint Designer you are pretty much stuffed because this is the only app that will allow you to perform certain things in SharePoint such as creating DataViews or customising the look & feel of your site...

Emile summarises it perfectly (I love his article):
http://agiledirect.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/developer-awareness-and-the-bad-reputation-of-sharepoint-designer-a-post-to-all-developers/

However, let me just say this to Microsoft, please please PLEASE! Drop this product and integrate ALL SharePoint development to the Visual Studio Interface!
Is that the plan for SharePoint 2010?
I really hope so cause I can't imagine myself having to deal with this "pile-of-smelly-stuff" ever again:

Thanks for listening & please leave comments if you agree with this post!

I feel alone today...

Etienne