Thanks Sebastian. From the best of my knowledge, I have done this. Installed myself as a user with full "db owner" attributes in the security settings and then associated myself as a user with the database. Yet, no luck.
I feel slightly honored to receive your response as I know you are quite knowledgeable about DotNetNuke, I recognize your name from having been browsing the forums a lot in the last two days, so I appreciate your assistance. However, there are some of us who are trying to get rolling for the first time and without a detailed understanding of exactly how connectionstrings are to be exactly written, security permissions to be exactly set, how to configure the web.config, etc., I feel dampened in frustration particularly due to the lack of specific direction, the mucho assumptions one inherently must know and as such I am unable to adequately determine how to debug my installation.
I have spent many hours over the last two days attempting to configure DotNetNuke on my Vista computer. I am sure it has to do with security features/permissions and how to refer to Databases correctly in the connectionstring or web.config settings or whatever. Unfortunately, I have spent lots of time reading through threads on installation and I have tried this, that and the other, and still I haven't been able to succeed. I am an obvious failure as clearly there must be something wrong otherwise it would work. Nevertheless, I tried to keep it simple, such as by downloading SQL Server 2005 Express, downloading the latest DotNetNuke "install" version and proceed yet I have failed.
I feel very unfortunate as I already have experience in setting up numerous other forms of CMS systems, albeit on a Windows XP or 2000 Pro, thus I don't understand why this must be so complicated.
So for now I don't know what to do, but I will quit DotNetNuke for now until I learn sufficient basics in ASP.Net, Vista, SQL Server 2005 Express to continue. Perhaps I jumped the gun thinking that I could get this up and running quickly without tons of programming skill.
As a word of wishful thoughts for the future, I would appreciate it if programmers could take a few moments prior to handing down their creations in providing assistance in the following ways:
1. You know you have cool software, it works, you want others to use it, as they desire...the thought process should be, "how can I make it as easy as possible for others to be able to use it as I do and what would they need to know or be able to do, and what must they have?"
2. Provide detailed instructions in a baby step-by-baby step method. Often this is difficult due to different operating systems. Unfortunately, I think it would be very helpful if someone pretended like they were trying to teach a 10 year old how to install it, what exactly would they have to do? Statements like "install the database" or "make sure you set the right permissions" doesn't cut it.
3. Often times files such as "web.config" need to be altered/configured. What's missing is exactly what and how. Not all of us know the exact syntax that will be accepted, even if we think we know what it is asking for. Then if it isn't clear, it can take hours upon hours to debug something that could have been neatly delineated in the first place.
4. The subject of permissions can be complicated. If permissions need to be set somewhere, exactly where does one set those permissions, what should be selected, how should it be set up, in which set of files, databases or services does this need to occur? There isn't sufficient documentation often on this point.
5. It would be handy to have a list of common errors along with a fact sheet clearly delineating the error code, the exact source (not always what the error says) and how to resolve it.
Perhaps there are other points, I'm sure I am not the only one to have ever had trouble installing DotNetNuke or establishing proper connections to databases.