Hi everyone
I know that this subject has been covered many times and in many ways but I cant find any instance of anyone wanting to do what I am trying to do, it always seems to be people trying to connect to the mdf file from SSMS but I'm trying to connect DNN to a SQL Server Express 2008 (non-mdf) database ....

My live hosting accesses SQL Server 2005. So I take my backup (.bak) file and restore it into SQL Server Express 2008 which is installed locally using SSMS. I then create a user, give dbowner, etc but I can't for the life of me then get the right web.config conection string to access it.

I even tried creating a blank database in SSE2008 and running an instance of the installer against it, thinking I could copy the conn string format. The instalkler gives choice of SQL Server 2005 (Express) File or SQL Server 200/2005. The key here is that the Express option is file only, and I dont want to connect to a file I want to connect to Express non-file version....... So I tried everything I could think of using the 'proper' SQL Server option, integrated security or not, etc etc.

Would be very grateful if anyone can suggest the right format for the conn string so I can connect to Express2008.
Many thnaks
Rob