C.1 Installing MSDE

MSDE is included with the Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework SDK. You must complete its setup after you run the main software installation. You do this by running the setup.exe program from the \Setup\MSDE\ subfolder under the main Visual Studio .NET or the Samples\Setup\MSDE\ directory under the main Framework SDK installation folder.

To connect to an MSDE instance, use the SQL Server provider. Remember, MSDE is simply a client-limited version of SQL Server. The connection string is similar but requires a slightly different Data Source parameter. If you use MSDE on the local machine, and you installed it with the .NET SDK, use the following connection string:

 Data Source=localhost\NetSDK 

If you installed MSDE with Visual Studio .NET, use the following instead:

 Data Source=localhost\VSdotNET 

You can also replace localhost with the name of an MSDE server. To view the MSDE service, and start, stop, or pause it, run the Computer Management utility (from the Administrative Tools section of the Control Panel), and browse to the Services and Applications Microsoft SQL Servers node (see Figure C-1).

Figure C-1. Installed SQL and MSDE services