Sharepoint Designer is very slow; what are the alternatives?

Question

A colleague of mine is trying (for the first time) to develop an application with SharePoint Designer. The structure of the data is very simplistic -- however there are a lot of fields/columns (several hundred). He's complaining that the designer is incredibly slow. Any change apparently causes some type of screen refresh that takes an intolerable amount of time. Unfortunately, I know precious little about SharePoint development (I'm an Asp.Net dev).

Are there alternatives to SharePoint developer for this type of work? Is it feasible to bypass the WYSIWYG view and edit the code directly? I'm curious to hear what others have done to deal with this issue.

Answer 1

This may or may not be related to the problem.

If Sharepoint Designer seems to be freezing from time to time try this:

Go to %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint Designer\ProxyAssemblyCache\12.0.0.6219

[Actual numbers may vary] and delete everything in there. Don't worry, it will be rebuilt on next load.

Answer 2

Is it feasible to bypass the WYSIWYG view and edit the code directly?

Yes, click on the "Code" view button in the bottom left-hand corner. Many people have performance problems with the Design view, but if your colleague is comfortable working in Code view then they will be able to get their work done a lot faster.