Connecting to SQL Server with Visual Studio Express Editions

Posted by tlianza on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by tlianza
Published on 2008-10-09T20:00:36Z Indexed on 2010/05/11 2:54 UTC
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visual-studio-2008

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c#

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visual-web-developer

I find it odd that in Visual C# 2008 Express edition, when you use the database explorer, your options are: 1) Microsoft Access 2) SQL Server Compact 3.5, and 3) SQL Server Database File.

BUT if you use Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, you can connect to a regular SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC, etc.

For people developing command-line or other C# apps that need to talk to a SQL Server database, do you really need to build your LINQ/Data Access code with one IDE (Visual Web Developer) and your program in another (Visual C#)? It's not a hard workaround, but it seems weird. If Microsoft wanted to force you to upgrade to Visual Studio to connect to SQL Server, why would they include that feature in one of their free IDEs but not the other? I feel like I might be missing something (like how to do it all in Visual C#).

Thanks! Tom

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