Question

At my work I found out that we belong to some program with Microsoft and get access to various products because of it.

I’ve downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

I’m not a professional programmer but I’ve dabbled before and I wanted to check out ASP.NET MVC. I know that I want to use some flavor of SQL Server and that I want to create a hobby website as a project (which may get deployed at some point in the future).

How do I create the schema for, and code against a local database that resides on my machine and then at a later point, use an external, actual SQL Server?

Does VS2010 make programming against a local SQL Server database pretty easy?

Answer 1

Developing against a local database is simple.

Download SQL Server Express (or SQL Server from MSDN, since it sonds like you have access).

Use your Web.config file to store your database Connection String. You can utilize it in your application using:

using(SqlConnection conn =
    new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.
        ConnectionStrings["MyConnectionString"].ConnectionString))
{
}

All you have to do is change the connection string in your application to point your application to the Production server:

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="MyConnectionString"
         connectionString="Data Source=localhost;
                           Initial Catalog=myDataBase;
                           User Id=myUsername;
                           Password=myPassword;" />
</connectionStrings>

Becomes

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="MyConnectionString"
         connectionString="Data Source=ProductionServer.MyDomain.com;
                           Initial Catalog=myDataBase;
                           User Id=myUsername;
                           Password=myPassword;" />
</connectionStrings>