SharePoint Designer

If you are working with SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), chances are that you have been working with SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint Designer can be use to push new pages or contents to SharePoint sites. In addition, we can also obtained SharePoint usage stats from SharePoint Designer. It can also be use to edit HTML, ASP.NET, CSS, XSL, etc. It is not as powerful as Visual Studio, but it should do a pretty decent job. It has a pretty decent What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor. In term of its look and feel, SharePoint Designer is pretty similar to its predecessor, Microsoft FrontPage. The best part is that SharePoint Designer has been made available by Microsoft for free. Below are the links to Microsoft site to download SharePoint designer:

SharePoint Designer 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

SharePoint Designer 2010 (32-Bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d88a1505-849b-4587-b854-a7054ee28d66

SharePoint Designer 2010 (64-Bit)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=566D3F55-77A5-4298-BB9C-F55F096B125D&displaylang=en

Some notes:

• SharePoint Designer 2010 RTM (Release to Market) has just come out last month. It is no longer beta version.
• Unlike SharePoint Designer 2007, which only have the 32-bit version, SharePoint Designer 2010 has 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
• According to the SharePoint Designer team blog site, we can have a side by side installation of SharePoint Designer 2007 and SharePoint Designer 2010.
• Also to my understanding, SharePoint Designer 2010 can not be use for MOSS 2007. So you still need to use SharePoint Designer 2007 to manage MOSS 2007.
  

If you are interested to learn more about SharePoint Designer, and also get development news in regards to SharePoint Designer, you might want to check out the Microsoft's SharePoint Designer blog. Microsoft's SharePoint Designer blog can be found under the following URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/.