Developer Forum

The SQLServer Express and associated tools that come with Visual Studio 2005
don't give me everything I need. So I want to install the full SQL Server and
SQL Server Management Console (or whatever that's called) on my development
computer along with Visual Studio 2005.

Here's my question: What components can I *deinstall* from the Visual Studio
2005 installation once I've installed the complete SQL Server and Tools on
the machine? When I look in Add/Remove Programs, there are all these SQL
Server entries that are there. I don't know which of them belongs to the SQL
Server that's installed with VS and which belong to the full SQL Server. I
don't want to have all this extraneous stuff on my machine but I'm confused
as to what I can remove.

Alex

For development purposes, you may be best served to examine the Developers
Edition of SQL Server. It is the same as Enterprise Edition, limited only by
the license.

When you install SQL Server, it will detect SQL Server Express and ask if
this is a 'Upgrade', or if you wish to install anther 'Instance'. Select
'Upgrade' and it will make all of the appropriate changes.

--
Arnie Rowland, Ph.D.
Westwood Consulting, Inc

Most good judgment comes from experience.
Most experience comes from bad judgment.
- Anonymous

Hello Alex,

As for the SQL Express, it is just an SQL Server 2005 database instance. So
if you have installed both SQL Express(by installing vs 2005) and SQL Serve
2005 server database instance, you can use either of them or remove either
of them. for other workstation tools (like management studio, configuration
tools ...), they can work for all those SQL Server 2005 instances, you do
not need to uninstall them. To uninstall the SQL Server Express instance,
you can follow the steps in the below BOL article:

#How to: Uninstall SQL Server Express
http://www.yqcomputer.com/

as it indicates, you can simply choose the "SQL Server 2005" in the
"control panel--->Add remove programs" panel and them it will let you
select which instance to remove. For your scenario, you should choose "SQL
Express".

BTW, after you remove SQL Express on your machine, you may need to adjust
some of the default .net framework 2.0 settings(in machine.config ) also
since some default database connection (for those default ASP.NET
providers) use SQL Express database file.

Hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


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