2017 UPDATE: if you are looking how to use SharePoint Designer 2013 with SharePoint Online / 2016, then please check out : “There is no SharePoint Designer 2016, but you can still use SharePoint Designer 2013“.
If you followed the social activity on the web ‘post ignite’ you may seen that SharePoint Designer may be killed off in SharePoint 2016. See Ben’s tweet after a session he attended :
Is this for real? If so, what’s going to replace it (if anything). I suspect this is just part of the general move to stop the amount of ‘customisations’ that customer’s currently do in SharePoint. Microsoft can’t maintain and support these long term (as it shackles innovation in the product), so I think it’s probably a good thing. There are often other ways to achieve the same thing in most cases.
What do you think? Will you miss it?
Using Visual is a better alternative for. The UI in Visual is much better these days. I will not miss SPD if it will not be supported.
Anyway, Visual Studio is much more powerful but expensive unlike SPD which is free. If you can’t afford Visual Studio then start using NAPA for App Model development. Using more developer tools means more jobs for developer perhaps.
I don’t see the worry as I can use SPD on SharePoint Online sites as with on premise.