I have spent the best part of 4 days trying to connect to SQL 2005
express from an winforms app! Yes , I have checked surface config and
TCP/IP blah blah ...

I have trawled the net and spent countless hours on MSDN and many have
tried to help. I have changed the passwords to strongly typed... I have
recreated the login a zillion times,mapped to different databases ,
checked firewall settings, switched off firewall...tried different
database roles, run every possible sp I can find.....attached the
database using the connection string, attached using management studio
and changing the connection string back, tried every possible
connection string I can find, pored through the logs at evry turn ...

Then i did it all again and again and again.

Has anybody managed to connect from an application ever.. (excuse the
cynicysm but I am at wits end)

The best error has to be this one proclaiming success and failure all
at the same time:

2006-11-28 22:00:24.46 Logon Login succeeded for user 'FJUser'.
Connection: non-trusted. [CLIENT: 192.xxx.x.x]
2006-11-28 22:00:24.46 Logon Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 16.
2006-11-28 22:00:24.46 Logon Login failed for user 'FJUser'. [CLIENT:
192.xxx.x.x]

Makes my confusion a little more bearable :-)

So now you've vented - I hope it helped. You have catalogued many things
you have tried but haven't told us what happened when you tried them. What
does work? Can FJUser sign in locally? Can you login using Windows
authentication locally or remotely? Does your software work on other SQL
Server instances? How many connections does it open? Does it work on SQL
Server 2000? You said you tried other applications. What happened with
them? Has any user successfully signed in remotely? What application work
locally? How far away is your impossibly remote application?

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<gregory.white (AT) ntlworld (DOT) com> wrote

One thing that might help you:
When i migrated our application from SQLserver 2000 to 2005, i had a
similar issue. That Application can not connect to SQL Server 2005.
SQL Management Studio works fine, but that Application...

The reason for this was:
- SQL Server 2000 uses case insensitive passwords
- SQL Server 2005 interpreted the same passwords with vase sensitivity
- the login dialog of the application was faulty. it converts the
passwords to uppercase allways and the connection to SQL Server 2005
never worked (unless you had an uppercase password set). After fixing
the App everything works fine.

gregory.white (AT) ntlworld (DOT) com schrieb: