I have found a lot of info on MS site regarding installing SQL Server 2005 Express as part of an application. I have found these articles to be extremely inaccurate or at best incomplete.
1. The documentation says all I need is the setup.exe from SQLEXP but this is not true.
2. When I do launch setup.exe during my app's install, it fails because setup.exe trys to run the support.msi. Of course this causes failure because my install is also an msi.
So, does anyone know how to install SQLEXPRESS as part of my app's install?
Thanks.
Hi Shawn,
I think you might be misreading the documentation you've found, Setup.exe is simply a bootstrapper that launches other SQL component installations. You have to deploy the entire SQL Express package, not just the setup.exe file.
You should deploy either SQLEXPR.EXE or SQLEXPR_ADV.EXE with your application, depending on which flavor of SQL Express you want to install. You should call these files by chaining them together. Most installer development tools allow you to specify additional installer packages to call at the end of your application installation. VS 2005 includes the ability to specify SQL Express as a prerequisite, which will automatically include SQLEXPR.EXE in your deployment package and create a custom bootstrapper that will install SQL Express and then your custom application. I know that VS Pro includes the installer projects, I'm not sure about VS Std.
You should also explore ClickOnce Deployment, this has the same ability to deploy SQL Express as a prerequisite and is supported in all Editions of VS, including the Express Editions.
Regards,
Mike Wachal
SQL Express team
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