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At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, I had the distinct pleasure to present the Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 session. The early estimates are that over 1000 people attended that session. I personally had a real good time talking about SharePoint Designer since, aside from the facts that it’s my favorite tool to customize SharePoint and that I co-authored the book on SharePoint Designer 2007, so many enhancements have been made to this product that I didn’t have to use the “maybe this feature will be included in the next version” answer even once in the session Q&A! Awesome!

As I announced earlier today, we will be doing a series of live online workshops on using SharePoint Designer. Asif Rehmani has just posted a really nice twenty minute, free screencast to give you some fundamentals pointers on how to get started.

If you have used SharePoint Designer already, you already know that it is truly essential to making many customizations in SharePoint. These customizations could be things like making your sites conform to the look and feel of your company branding or fetching data from a variety of data sources and displaying it on a SharePoint page or creating powerful workflows on your sites (a more thorough list of the things you can accomplish with SharePoint Designer appears in another section below). Until now, you could only get SharePoint Designer in one of a few ways:

In my first post, I had mentioned that the mighty Data View web part (DVWP) has many potential applications in the real world. While thinking about what I wanted to show in my first example of the DVWP, I felt inspired by Mark and his team who had created a Quote of the Day web part (QOTD as termed by Mark) using the Content Editor web part (CEWP) and some javascript… a very nifty solution. The quotes in that web part are embedded within so you can change them by directly going to the source editor of CEWP.
The solution that I have presented in this article is a bit different from the other QOTD. It utilizes the DVWP as the presentation component.

There are 66 web parts that come with the Enterprise license of MOSS. None of these web parts come even close to the power provided by the Data View web part (DVWP). Officially called the “XSLT Data View web part” (also known as the “XSLT Data Form web part”), this web part has the ability to fetch data from a variety of sources as XML and then use the eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transforms as the markup language to format that data and present it on a page. DVWP can get data from any of the following sources: