I was getting the following error when trying to add my local MS SQL server 2008 Express database to the data connections in Visual Web Developer 2008 Express :
Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server
The problem was that I was using just (local) in the server name field. To solve the problem, I had to add the instance name (sqlexpress) like this:
(local)\sqlexpress
When I entered that into the server name field, everything worked perfectly.
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