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Connecting from VS 2005 to a SQL express instance on another machine took me some puzzling. The sqlexpress weblog has a recipe how to get that done.  Which did not work as written down (most likely because it's addressing previous CTP's not the release build) but provided enough info to get it to work on my machine. Let me share this.

SqlExpress is installed as a part of VS. To get some tools I installed SQL server 2005 pro, a present from the launch party, on top of that. By default this server instance does not accept any connections from another machine. You switch that on using the SQL Server configuration manager. After a default install only the shared memory protocol is switched on. Activate the TCP/IP protocol:

Now the sql server instance will accept a remote connection. As you can see in the dialog it will listen on all IP addresses on port 1070. You need this information to connect from VS.

The server name is more complex than I was used to. It consists out of three parts: The machine name (Peckoltia), the named instance of SQL server (SQLexpress) and the port number (1070).