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?
This is a terrible mistake from Microsoft. SharePoint Designer is often used in huge companies for customization, if sever side is not allowed. And believe. this is available even in companies like HP. So I think Microsoft should support this. But as always, Microsoft is not listening to the customers.
There is nothing called SharePoint Designer 2016, however, you can use SharePoint designer with SharePoint 2016.
You can use the latest version of SharePoint Designer 2013 that is supported with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016.
Atleast, this is how our Hosted SharePoint 2016 environment is configured. Our customers use SharePoint Designer 2013 with our Hosted SharePoint Server 2016 offering.