Source control in Sharepoint Designer (SD) is arguably more a headache than a solution; especially when more than one person is editing the same code. In my case, I am mostly using SD to edit static files (css, js and html).
I suppose it depends on the sharepoint development environment (currently using development VMs), but I have experienced conflicts where SD does not allow you to check-in/out, can not allow you to save…. and a whole host of other issues that makes mastering the tool difficult.
what other ides do you use for sharepoint development other than SD? Preferably a non-Microsoft solution? Has any one successfully stopped using sharepoint developer totally?
For css/javascript/ html we use Aptana. it’s a derivative of Eclipse and supports Eclipse plug-ins. Aptana allows you to define multiple debugging environments, so you can test for FF, IE 6 – 8, etc. Just to warn you, there have been times when we’ve tested in Aptana and once we’ve imported the resulting mark-up into SharePoint we have run into weird issues as SharePoint does not support standard HTML.