The title says it all.   Microsoft has made SharePoint Designer available for free at http://www.microsoft.com/spd.

A few words of advice when using SharePoint Designer

• Use SharePoint designer on your development environment and then have a developer package up your modifications into a solution package (.WSP) that can be redeployed and reused in the future.
• Using SharePoint Designer for 1 off simple workflows is not a sin.   Just remember that it is not a simple process to move an existing SharePoint Designer workflow to another location.
• Remember that if you make any change to a web page in SharePoint using SharePoint Designer it becomes “unghosted”.   This means a copy of the page is now stored in the content database instead of living in its original location.  If the original file that the page is based upon is changed or updated it will not be reflected in your unghosted page.
• SharePoint Designer is great for creating dataview web parts or for working out XSL formatting issues.   Once you have the web part working the way you want, always export it and then revert the page back to the site definition.   You can then import the web part back into the site and place it on the page.    This will prevent the page from staying unghosted.
• SharePoint Designer can help you tweak your Master Pages and CSS files.    Make sure that you do this only in your development server and then package the results into a solution package (.WSP) for deployment on your production servers.
• Make sure your server is patched up well before using SharePoint Designer.   There was a bug fixed in a recent hot fix that would cause the W3WP worker process to crash when SharePoint Designer is connected to a site.     You don’t want that to happen on your production site. 

If you have any constructive best practices for using SharePoint Designer please post a comment.   For those anti-SPD people, please don’t just say “Don’t use it”.    :-,,)

While attempting to use SharePoint Designer to make some minor modifications to the editform.aspx page of a list I ran into a situation where the W3WP.EXE process on the SharePoint server would crash. 

In the application event log on the SharePoint server I found the following error:

Faulting application w3wp.exe, version 6.0.3790.3959, stamp 45d6968e, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.2.3790.4062, stamp 46264680, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000bee7.

This really doesn’t offer much help.  But what I did know I could reproduce the error easily by attempting to edit any aspx page in SharePoint Designer.    I decided to load up Fiddler to take a peak at the HTTP requests to the server to see if I could find any clues as to the cause of the error.

With Fiddler running I could see that everything was loading fine into SharePoint Designer right up until it tried to call the GetAssemblyMetaData method on the webpartpages.asmx webservice.   Once that request was made I immediately saw the w3wp.exe error in the event log and according to Fiddler all other request just appeared to hang.  

Within Fiddler I could look at an XML representation of the request.  There I saw that the GetAssemblyMetaData method was taking a few parameters.  One of the parameters was called assemblyName and was being set to microsoft.office.server.search, version=12.0.0.0, culture=neutral, publickeytoken=71e9bce111e9429c.

Interesting, why would SharePoint Designer be trying to get assembly meta data information from the SharePoint search assembly?   I opened up my custom masterpage for the SharePoint site and found the following registration:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="SEARCHWC" Namespace="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,Version=12.0.0.0,Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

I did some research and from everything I can see I really don’t need that assembly registration in my masterpage.   Once I removed this line from the masterpage I was able to load and edit the editform.aspx file within SharePoint Designer with no problems.

It is important to note that this issue didn’t surface until the December cumulative patches were applied bringing the environment to version 12.0.0.6335.  Prior to that patch we were able to use SharePoint Designer without issue even when the masterpage had the SharePoint search assembly registration. 

One other interesting point is that after this registration tag was removed I watched all of the calls SharePoint Designer made to the SharePoint server.   The GetAssemblyMetaData method was never called.    I really wonder what triggers SharePoint Designer to call that method on the SharePoint search assembly registration and not on any other assembly registration.    

I would love to hear from anyone who has had a similar experience or might be able to shed some light on the GetAssemblyMetaData method call from SharePoint Designer.

Update: It looks like this may have been fixed in the February cumulative updates for SharePoint.     From the release notes: “issues fixed: When you open a SharePoint Search site by using SharePoint Designer, the W3wp.exe process crashes.”

Problem:  User had personal information changed in Active Directory, such as last name or email address and SharePoint continues to display and/or use the old information in sites.   The user profile information on the mysite appears correct.

Issue:  SharePoint only syncs user information in sites for “Active” users.  These are users that are explicitly added to a SharePoint group in a site.   A user that belongs to an AD group that was added into a SharePoint group is not considered active by SharePoint.

Fix: Add the user directly to a group within the site temporarily until the profile sync process occurs.  Once the information is updated you can remove the user from the group.  You can try to force a sync with the command stsadm –o sync

Additional Information:
It is possible to verify this issue by running a query directly against the SQL Database tables.    Run the following query against each of the content databases to find out in what sites the user information needs to be synced.

select tp_login,tp_title,tp_email,tp_isactive, c.fullurl from dbo.userinfo a
inner join dbo.sites b on a.tp_SiteID = b.Id
inner join dbo.webs c on b.RootWebId = c.Id
where a.tp_login=’domainusername’

Replace domainusername with the full domain and username of the affected user.
The field tp_isactive should be 1 when the user is directly added to the site and 0 when the user is not directly added to the site.   The sync process will only occur with the tp_isactive is set to 1. 

NOTE:  Do not use insert, update or delete statements against the database tables.