I have Visual Studio 2005 Professional, SQL Server 2005 Express, SQL Server
Management Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2008 Professional installed on my
Windows XP SP3. When I try to install SQL Server 2008 Express with
Microsoft Web Platform Installer, I'm getting the following error message:

"SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools is incompatible with Microsoft SQL
Server Express 2005"

How do I get around this problem? Is it not possible to have both SQL
Server 2005 Express and SQL Server 2008 Express installed at the same time?
I've seen some people reporting that they uninstalled their SQL Server 2005
Express and still got this error message. I have a SQL Server 2005 Express
database that I want to keep. If I uninstall my SQL Server 2005 Express and
am able to install SQL Server 2008 Express, will SQL Server 2008 Express
work with my Visual Studio 2005 Pro.?

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Mark (mkhueb (AT) gmail (DOT) com) writes:
It's certainly possible to have two instances of Express Edition
installed in parallel, even if of different versions. Although only
of the instances can be called SQLEXPRESS, of course.

I don't know what the web installer does, but go to
downloads.microsoft.com and search for other downloads of Express.
They may not have Service Pack1 included, so you may need to install
that separately.

Well, if you uninstall the database will still be there, and you can
attach it to SQL 2008. But you should not do it, if you want the database
to in SQL 2005 format.

Well, SQL Server does not bother about VS as such, but whether VS 2005
can cope with SQL 2008, I don't know. But I would not really expect it.
(But I am not really the right person to ask about Visual Studio. I
try to avoid it as much as I can.)



--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel (AT) sommarskog (DOT) se

Links for SQL Server Books Online:
SQL 2008: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/cc514207.aspx
SQL 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895970.aspx
SQL 2000: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinf...ons/books.mspx

Thanks Erland. I followed your advice and installed it from Microsoft's web
site. I had to install Windows Installer first. Also ran into a problem
with it saying that I had to restart Windows before the install would
continue but overcame that with the following advice:

Start regedit and find the key
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Session Manager" and
then rename "PendingFileRenameOperations" to "PendingFileRenameOperations2"

"Erland Sommarskog" <esquel (AT) sommarskog (DOT) se> wrote