Pros and cons of editing sharepoint master page in sharepoint designer or visual studio?

Question

Pros and cons of editing sharepoint master page in sharepoint designer or visual studio? Which one do you prefer

Answer 1

Hi Isha

SharePoint Designer

Pro:

• WYSIWYG editing
• Very fast turaround Edit/save/test

Con:

• No Version control
• Cumbersome reuse/deployment (Download/Upload)

Visual Studio

Pro:

• Integration with Source Control
• Deployment/Reuse via Feature/Solution framework

Con:

• Pure source code editing
• Cumbersome Edit/Deploy/Test cycle

SharePoint Designer & Visual Studio

My recommendation is to use SharePoint Designer to develop the master page on your development machine. Then save the MasterPage into a Visual Studio solution for deployment to Test/Production: Pro:

• WYSIWYG editing
• Very fast turaround Edit/save/test
• Integration with Source Control
• Deployment/Reuse via Feature/Solution framework

Con:

• You need both tools, but SharePoint designer is free and this is in general the most efficient way of developing for SharePoint. Make what you can using SPD and the Web UI, then save it into a Visual Studio Solution for version control/deployment