SharePoint Designer is available free of charge from Microsoft who wants to encourage power users and developers to customize the SharePoint 2010 environment to meet a wide variety of business needs. The workstation or server needs to have .NET 3.5 installed, and as discussed in the previous section, the web application needs to be configured to allow the use of SharePoint Designer 2010.
SharePoint Designer 2010 is available in both 32- and 64-bit versions, so developers should be sure to download the version that corresponds to their workstation’s operating system version. The main decision point between 32- and 64-bit development machines comes down to the 4GB limit for 32-bit Vista and XP workstations.
To Install SharePoint Designer 2010, follow these steps:
With SharePoint Designer 2010 downloaded and installed, development can begin immediately as long as the user has a minimum of designer-level rights to a SharePoint 2010 site.