I’m installing SQL Server Express 2005 from my Visual Studio 2008 setup project.
This works fine and installs the instance “SQLExpress”.
Does anyone know if you can pass it some kind of command line to install or change a property to give it a different instance name?
See this article on how to edit the bootstrapper that installs SQL as part of the setup. There is indeed an INSTANCENAME attribute (and you can also pass DEFAULTDATABASE and all sorts of useful command line parameters).
http://www.windowsdevelop.com/clickonce-setup–deployment-projects/generic-bootstrapper–sql-express-named-instance-18693.shtml