Here is a question that came in from my blog today.
My company is starting to plan to migrate to SP 2013 and I just found out that the design and split view is not included in SP Designer. This is going to be absolutely devasting for us as this is really the only way we do development. We have so many items created with XSL that I can’t imagine what we are going to do when we migrate. Can you update me on if MS has reconsidered adding that back and if not, where do I go to post my comments and to add my voice to those that are not happy?
Unfortunately, questions about the missing Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013 are fairly commonplace and sadly I have no good news. Those views are gone and as far as I know are not coming back. Any uproar that occurred due to my earlier posts like SharePoint Designer 2013′s Missing Design View – It’s Official fell on deaf ears.
I tend to write my own XSL, and one can certainly continue to do so using SharePoint Designer 2013. The Design View was always inexact, but since it was where we saw any error messages, I find that is why I miss it the most.
Display Templates – which are built of markup and script – are worth looking at, as are frameworks like Knockout or AngularJS. Yes, new things to learn, but more the way Web development is headed.
I also don’t know of anywhere to go to register complaints about this. I find that the MSDN Forums may make you feel better, but are rarely monitored by Microsoft people who can push for changes. Microsoft Connect is supposed to be the place to report bugs and give feedback, but things seem to languish there as well.
None of this is much solace for people who need to maintain existing XSL-based solutions. Bottom line: we all need to learn new tricks and/or rewrite our older XSL-based solutions.
