Proper order of installation VS 2012 Express and SQL Server 2012 Express

Question

On Win7 64 system which didn\'t have any editon of SQL Server installed, i installed Visual Studio 2012 for Web. I tought it will give me option to install SQL Server 2012 E

Answer 1

It should install with no problem, I just did this a couple of weeks ago exactly in the same order, first VS 2012 and then SQL Server, and it worked flawlessly.

Just install and setup SQL Server following the setup, reboot and you'll be able to connect from VS's DB Explorer.

If that doesn't work your best bet is to reinstall everything from scratch.

Answer 2

Yes, there is a specific order. If you install SQL2012 first, you won't be able to open .sql files in VS2012's object explorer (been there, done that). This is a bug that was fixed with a special "SQL Server Data Tools - December 2012 update". The sad thing is, this update does not appear in the regular Windows Updates (on my Windows 8), nor on any SQL updates detected before or after SP1 was installed.

Therefore, the proper order is: VS2012 first, and then SQL2012. Especially when applying service packs.

Source:

http://blog.wharton.com.au/category/sql-server-data-tools/

If you happened to install SQL2012 first, and then VS2012, you will need the November 2012 Update to fix your .sql files:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/jj650015

A bit more background... I've been using Visual Studio since 2002. I have always installed my own SQL Server 20XX edition before I installed Visual Studio 2003, 2005, 2008, 2010, and most recently 2012. This is because I never used the SQL Server Express that came with Visual Studio. My data files were far too large for the 2 GB limits imposed by earlier editions of SQL Server Express. By installing SQL Server first, this allowed me to use the root instance name on the machine, instead of SQL Express taking it over in the past decade.

I never had a problem with this order, until VS2012 and SQL2012. As noted in the blog article above, install VS2012 first before SQL Server.