Creating an installable layout for Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions with SQL Express SP1

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I previously posted an article describing how to download and create an installable network layout of the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions. The instructions in my blog article describe how to download the version of SQL Express that originally shipped with the Express Editions. However, there has been a new version of SQL Express shipped since then - SQL Express 2005 Service Pack 1.

A customer recently found that article and asked me if it is possible to swap out SQL Express 2005 SP1 in the instructions for creating an installable layout. The problem that the customer observed is that there is only a single version of SQL Express SP1 (named sqlexpr.exe) available for public download, but the intructions in my blog article list a version named sqlexpr32.exe for 32-bit Express Edition install scenarios.

I asked around about the different versions of SQL Express, and it turns out that sqlexpr.exe is a superset package that contains both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. The Visual Studio and SQL teams decided to create a separate 32-bit-only version named sqlexpr32.exe in order to reduce download size and time for what is likely to be the most common scenario - installing a Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition on a 32-bit OS.

If you would like to create an installable Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition layout with SQL Express 2005 SP1 instead of the original version of SQL Express, you can use the following instructions in place of the SQL Express instructions listed in my previous blog article:

SQL Server Express (x86)

  1. Make a new folder named c:\visual_webdev\wcu\SSE
  2. Navigate to the URL https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=65212 and choose to save the file sqlexpr.exe to the folder c:\visual_webdev\wcu\SSE
  3. Go to the folder c:\visual_webdev\wcu\SSE and rename sqlexpr.exe to sqlexpr32.exe to match the name that setup expects the file to have

SQL Server Express (x64)

  1. Make a new folder named c:\visual_webdev\wcu\SSE
  2. Navigate to the URL https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=65212 and choose to save the file sqlexpr.exe to the folder c:\visual_webdev\wcu\SSE