CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sharepoint
Howard Pinsley
Howard Pinsley

Reputation: 11468

Sharepoint Designer is very slow; what are the alternatives?

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.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 6685

Answers (5)

pixelbobby
pixelbobby

Reputation: 4440

I'm bringing back this old thread with a solid answer. I've been scouring the net for this one for long time.

I finally found a Visual Studio add-in SPDevExplorer on CodePlex. It rocks!!

At first glance here it's very easy to use-- just like SPD but faster IDE and posting back to SharePoint.

Keep in mind it you have to install the WSP on your farm and it doesn't seem to work with anything higher than Visual Studio 2008.

Happy coding ! :)

Upvotes: 0

Sigeg P
Sigeg P

Reputation: 11

Try this:

  1. Edit the file in text edit mode using SharePoint designer,
  2. Find and remove blank lines (try to scroll down, and look for hundreds/thousands blank lines/rows),
  3. Save and close the file.
  4. Open the file with Visual Studio,
  5. Remove all white spaces (tabs),
  6. Save and close it.
  7. Try again to open and edit the file in SharePoint designer :)

I happened to have in this situation. The file that was being edited was amazingly grew 30 times in size. SharePoint Designer could not open the file after it reached around 3MB of size. Fortunately, after doing steps 1-6 above, I can edit the file again with normal speed.

Upvotes: 1

Serge van den Oever
Serge van den Oever

Reputation: 4392

If you want to edit the code of pages in a SharePoint list or document library you can do this in Visual Studio, WebMatrix or any other editor. You can open the files directly over webdav (at least in Windows 7) using the following path:

\MyServer.com\DavWWWRoot\sites\MySite\MySubSite

To find out the path (SharePoint 2010):

  1. Go in a site to a document library
  2. Click the Library tab in the Library Tools section (at top of page)
  3. Select 'Open with Explorer', Windows fole explorer opens
  4. Righ-click on any file in document library and select Properties
  5. Under Location you see the webdav path
  6. Select the path to site level where you want to edit
  7. Open this path in Visual Studio, WebMatrix or any other editor
  8. Edit files in an editor of your choice
  9. Keep SharePoint Designer arround for all the other tasks

For SharePoint 2007 you can also use the SharePoint Developer Explorer add-in for Visual Studio, see http://spdevexplorer.codeplex.com/. I did not have the time yet to upgrade it for Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Upvotes: 2

Todd Owen
Todd Owen

Reputation: 16198

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.

Upvotes: 0

Chris Cudmore
Chris Cudmore

Reputation: 30151

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.

Upvotes: 2

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