I've seen a number of people bringing this message up in the forums recently so I thought I would blog about it rather than type the answer over and over. (I'm lazy that way.) Problem When you run the installer you get the following error after the...

A few of you have run into problems when trying to add a new Service-based database to your project in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. This problem has been reported to Microsoft Connect and the Visual Studio team is working on a fix, but I thought I would provide...

Clearly, the names of our components are getting too long, but that's a matter for another post… Many of you have noticed that the VS bootstrapper for SQL Express 2008 (and similarly the bootstrapper for Windows Installer 4.5) are installed by the...

There is an extra step that you need to take when upgrading from one edition of SQL Server 2008 to another, for example when upgrading from Express to Express with Tools. This extra step is called Edition Upgrade (sometimes SKU Upgrade) and the net result...

Microsoft has announced the release of SQL Server 2008 and that means it time for another post about SQL Server Express. The press release indicated that SQL Express is already available, but those of you who have followed the link have found that...

I've gotten a number of questions recently asking how SQL Express uses resources during idle time, and how that behavior impacts the way SQL Express behaves "on first connection" after being idle for a period of time. While many of these questions have...

I've waited far too long to communicate this disappointing news to everyone, so here it is… I'm not going to be releasing the SQL Express SP2 Bootstrapper manifests that I had discussed in a long ago blog posting . I'll spare you the sob story of my...

Many of you are working with User Instances , sometimes without even realizing it. Briefly, a User Instances is special process of SQL Express that can be started by an application at runtime and allows SQL Express to emulate some of the characteristics...

Now that SQL Server 2005 SP2 has been released I thought I should make good on my promise to explain more about how we handle Windows Vista User Access Control in SQL Express SP2. I explained earlier that UAC works by removing the administrator ACEs from...

Update: After a recent article on CNNMoney.com (see my post with the link to the article) I thought I would add to this post to clarify that SQL Express SP1 is supported for use on Windows Vista. As discussed in this post, there are some issues that SP2...

A number of people have been experiencing a problem launching the Business Intelligence Developer's Studio after installing SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit. The problem is that the shortcut is pointing to a file named devenv.exe that isn't there...

In this post I'm going to explore the various ways you can configure SQL Server Express during installation. The easiest way is to just use the Setup UI, but that isn't ideal when you want to embed SQL Express into your own application installer. Command...

I've gotten a number of e-mails asking how to detect if SQL Express is installed on a computer. I'm finally getting around to putting this in the Blog so I don't have to keep typing the answer. We've made discovery much easier in SQL Server 2005 with...

The problem of data not being saved is usually the result the Copy to output directory property of the database file. The Copy to output directory property controls if and when a file is copied during deployment of a VS application, including when you...

Updated The information in this posting is superseded by the following KB Article: 914277 How to configure SQL Server 2005 to allow remote connections http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;914277 ------------------------------...

This is the short version, the longer version is further down, also make sure and review the SQL Express BOL and the Mini BOL . Follow these steps: 1. Make sure express is running correctly (assumes a default install) Drop to a cmd prompt ...

Because of changes in the SQL Server 2005 metadata we have updated SQLDMO, the new version is SQLDMO9, it should work with SQL Server 7/2000 and 2005. For backwards compatibility it is installed by SQL Express so that existing DMO apps should just work...

SQL Server Express will be free to use and redistribute. The only requirement that we have is that you register to redistribute the product. The reason we require registration for redistribution is that we want to ensure that we can get critical security...

After seeing a number of issues about this, I realized that we needed to comment on this. For SQL Express, all networking protocols except shared memory are disabled by default. There is a command line setup switch called DISABLENETWORKPROTOCOLS which...