Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center: Using SQL Express from Visual Basic 6

Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center: Using SQL Express from Visual Basic 6: "Visual Basic developers have long used Access databases as a solution for local storage of application data. Access made it very simple to ship a database with your application, and connecting to the database was no more complicated than putting the path to the database in the connection string. For more complex scenarios, developers could scale up to the Microsoft Desktop Storage Engine (MSDE). This provided developers with SQL Server functionality and reliability, but at the expense of ease of use. With MSDE, you had to attach databases before they could be connected to. When the application shut down, the database file was still in use by the MSDE engine, making uninstall and reinstall more complicated. MSDE also did not provide any administrative interface, so any administration of the database had to be done through command line tools. In addition, MSDE was difficult to deploy with an application.

As part of the effort to develop Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, Microsoft is addressing all these limitations of MDSE, replacing it with a new product called SQL Server 2005 Express.

While information about SQL Express has so far been targeted at .NET framework developers, this article will show how SQL Express is a boon for VB6 development as well. SQL Express will provide the developer power of SQL Server, but also the ease of use of access by letting you connect directly to a database file on disk. Best of all, it’s completely free, and can be redistributed with your application."