I’ve installed VS2010 Express and all associated SQL. I’ve got an instance running on my local machines of .\sqlexpress and I can connect to it with SSMS. I’ve created some tables etc.
I want to use Linq to SQL so I have created a new empty .dbml file in my solution. I assume the next step is to connect to the database, but I don’t know how as I’ve never done this before.
I tried Add Connection as it suggests, and the Data Source I can choose Access Database, SQL Server Compact 3.5 or SQL Server Database File.
The Database File one says, “use it to connect to a local instance”, so I click that. Then it asks for a database file name, new or existing. Surely I should be typing in the instance name not doing this file thing? If I do type something in, it crease a .mdf in my documents folder and it doesn’t really help me much.
Any ideas how I can get this to work?
I finally figured this out via a blog post or two somewhere online. With the express edition, the option to connect to a local database in the normal way via IP or ./sqlexpress is not present. You have to connect using a File, by finding the .mdf file on your hard disk (within the SQL server folder somewhere) that represents your database, and selecting it.
I have no idea what happens if you update your database schema in SSMS, or why they’ve restricted it to this bizarre method, but it works and I have been able to query my database.