Hitchhikers Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server: Best Practice Architectures and Examples, 7th Edition (Microsoft Windows Server System Series)

One of the first chores your code will have to accomplish is getting connected to a selected SQL Server instance. Given the number of newsgroup messages I see every day regarding connection issues, it makes sense to provide quite a bit of detail here about the challenges you'll face. Here, I'll talk about a number of SQL Server configurations and installation options and how each requires different connection strategies. Connecting to more recent versions of SQL Server has been made especially difficult, given the new default configurations that essentially make SQL Server "invisible"instances no longer broadcast their existence or even enable external ports or protocols. I talked about how to configure SQL Server to make it visible on the network in Chapter 2, "How Does SQL Server Work?", and I'll add more detail on these issues here in this chapter.