Hello all and thanks in advance for any help.

I have built personal applications for a while now, and have used a local database in my applications.

I am currently creating an application that uses a SQL Express 2005 database and the application will be installable and distributable however I have come into an issue with the connection string. I have used them before locally, however I dont understand how it is suppossed to work on an installable application.

I'm using Visual Studio 2005 installation process and requiring SQL Express 2005 installed as a pre-requisite, but how do I get the application to get the correct connection string when the data source could be anything on the users machine?

The closest idea that I can guess is having the application assume the data source by concatenating the machine name and "\SQLEXPRESS", as it seems to be on my machine. So as an example, when the user runs the application, the app finds the machine name is "ACB123" so assumes the Data Source is ACB123\SQLEXPRESS.

Anyway I hope I have explained my situation well enough, and again thanks in advance for any help.

-Esteban

It shouldn't be necessary to figure out the machine name. If SQL Express is installed to the default instance name, you should be able to get away with any of these:

127.0.0.1\SQLEXPRESS
localhost\SQLEXPRESS
.\SQLEXPRESS

If you are connecting with the native .NET SQL client then this might even work:
(local)\SQLEXPRESS

-Peter
compiledthoughts.com

Awesome thanks. I will test this with some friends on their machines. However you did say that these should work if they had installed SQL Express with the default instance name. So if they did not, what is the common practice? I guess I could create a first-use process that requests the user to enter in the data source if the defaults you've stated above dont work assuming that if they changed the instance name they must know what they're doing enough to understand what to enter for "Default Data Source not found, please enter".

Anyway thanks for the response.

Yes. I would think so too.

There may also be a way in .NET to discover active SQL servers. I know that you can "browse" your network for instance of SQL in the management studio environments, but I'm not sure if that will pick up named instances.

-Peter
compiledthoughts.com