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Asked: 2026-06-15T17:04:36+00:00

When I create a new ASP.Net MVC 4 project with Visual Studio 2012 it

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When I create a new ASP.Net MVC 4 project with Visual Studio 2012 it puts the data in an mdf file in the project directory.

What I would like to do at this point is to migrate the database to an SQL Server instance gently, keeping all the scaffold stuff provided by the ASP.Net MVC 4 project template (I mean user accounts management etc.)

What would be the right step-by-step way to do this?

How exactly should I change the connection string?

How should I authentify my application in SQL Server in production?

Sorry for a dumb question but I haven’t dealt with ASP.Net applications before, in my previous experience (which was with WinForms) all the actual users had a separate SQL Server account and it was pretty straightforward.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The whole User Instance and AttachDbFileName= approach is flawed – at best! Visual Studio will be copying around the .mdf file and most likely, your INSERT works just fine – but you’re just looking at the wrong .mdf file in the end!

    The real solution in my opinion would be to

    1. install SQL Server – Express (and you’ve already done that anyway) or any other edition

    2. install SQL Server Management Studio (Express)

    3. create your database in SSMS Express, give it a logical name (e.g. YourDatabase)

    4. connect to it using its logical database name (given when you create it on the server) – and don’t mess around with physical database files and user instances. In that case, your connection string would be something like:

      Data Source=.\\SQLEXPRESS;Database=YourDatabase;User ID=AppUser;Pwd=Top$ecret

      and everything else is exactly the same as before…

    For deployment to production, you basically have a number of options:

    1. create deployment SQL scripts yourself and have them executed using sqlcmd or any other useful SQL script runner

    2. use a SQL diff tool like Red-Gate SQL Compare or even the built-in Visual Studio diff tool to determine difference between the database version installed at your client’s site, and the new version, and create a single upgrade SQL script from that diff

    3. use the Visual Studio Database Projects and let VS handle the upgrade scripts and deployments. VS database projects craft a model on top of your database – you basically only ever create the CREATE TABLE .... script and the VS tools figure out what needs to be altered, dropped, created fresh

    4. if you’re using Entity Framework code-first – look into using the EF code-first migrations to update your database from C# code

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