I’ve been experimenting with using ASP.NET MVC inside a standard ASP.NET Web Application (Web Forms).  I really like what’s been released with MVC 1.0 and can see places where existing apps would benefit from the features.  Plus, having just finished Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from Wrox (see my book review), I couldn’t wait to start using it. 

The last chapter of the book, Chapter 12, entitled “Best of Both Worlds: Web Forms and MVC Together,” discusses configuring an ASP.NET Web Application to support the new ASP.NET MVC features.  Note that adding Web Forms to an ASP.NET MVC project template is much easier (meaning no configuration/reference changes), since ASP.NET MVC is built on top of the ASP.NET Framework.  Anyway, after referencing the required libraries, creating the necessary directories, and updating the web.config, you’ll find that templates for the MVC items (e.g. Controllers, Views), are missing as options.  More...

Yesterday I was trying to add a database to the App_Data folder of a simple web application I was creating.  During one of my computer re-installs, I didn't install SQL Express since I normally use a full blown SQL instance, so I really had no need for it.  Now that I did need it, I wanted to run SQL Express 2008.  I am running Windows Vista x64, so I proceeded to download SQL Express 2008 x64.  I installed it and loaded up SQL Server Management Studio to make sure the instance was working (I just used the default of SQLEXPRESS for the instance name).  Everything was fine.  I then fired up Visual Studio, right-clicked on the App_Data folder of the web app, and... error (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Connections to SQL require SQL Express

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