Changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013

Hi, I’m Keenan Newton, a senior product marketing manager on the SharePoint team.

We’re making some changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013, and I wanted to talk about the reasoning behind the changes.

With SharePoint Server 2013 embracing new web standards for client side rendering of pages such as JavaScript, JSON, and OData, there is no longer a need to support a visual web page editor within SharePoint Designer. With that in mind, we removed the ability to visually edit pages in SharePoint Designer 2013 because its page editor is designed to only understand the unique features of a SharePoint web page. With our support of new web standards, any web page designer can now be used for editing web pages in SharePoint Server 2013. This includes form customization, conditional formatting of page content, layout, theming and branding. To simplify the process of integrating customized SharePoint pages, SharePoint Server 2013 includes a new feature called the SharePoint Design Manager. This feature enables a web designer to export a web page from SharePoint, customize it, and then import it back into SharePoint, all right from the SharePoint site.

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SPD does not open sharepoint sites

You try to open a site in SharePoint designer but are not able to do so. Well, there can be two major reasons for this to happen. I blogged about the first one some time ago. If you have not created a site collection first and you try to open it in SharePoint designer, it will throw following error:

Server error: The URL “http://server/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll” is not contained within a Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Site.


Again, this error occurs if you have created a web application but have not created site collection yet and you try to open it in designer.





Figure 1: Server error

Second reason SharePoint designer fails to open a site is that there are two sites bound to the same port. Extend the application and create new IIS site and then open with SharePoint designer, it will now open. The problem is that if IIS has more than one binding then site will not open with SPD. Check IIS. If there are two sites bound to the same port the site will not open. Simply shutting down one site will NOT resolve the problem. You have to extend the application to the new IIS port.

There is a possibility that you will see sites and folders in designer now but clicking them will not open them. Again, the solution is to extend your site to a port other than port 80. Port 80 is the default port and have binding to default site. If you can somehow remove existing bindings, you may use port 80 as well but I haven’t tried it.

Programmatically reading SharePoint Designer Workflow XOML files at run time(Via Keith Richie)

Extract from the original post "After poking around and searching for a few days without any luck, I ran across this posting from Joe Zamora: “Query/enumerate all declarative workflow templates in an SPWeb and programmatically read the XOML files”

Perfect! I thought. This was exactly what I was looking for. I took his sample, cleaned it up a bit, and wrote a method to get to the XOML file. "

Read complete blog post here.

Announcing InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 No-Code Workflow Training for SharePoint 2010(Via SharePoint Solutions)

Extract from the original post "The business process automation capabilities of SharePoint 2010 (all editions) are fast becoming some of its most popular features. Streamlined business processes reduce labor and supply costs dramatically and improve both efficiency and office morale. It is rare to find one element that can make such a huge impact on a workplace environment."

For complete post click here.