One other tip:  your development environment should mirror production as much as possible. 

If production uses the Enterprise version, development should also. 

If production is located 20 miles away, development...

Does the emphasis on short term (30 day) results lead to problems because there is limited time for planning the overall project such as the database design and documenting the...

Thanks for the suggestions. In particular to Joe for putting into words the concept I was struggling with about row and entity. For our system, it is inventory...

Have you tried connecting using ODBC? It has a test button. You should see the MSDE instance from the ODBC wizard.

Have you tried accessing it on the same machine it is running on? Can you find the service running? I think there should be an icon in the...

You make several good points. I like a prefix on views so I know where to look in the database for the view/table. On some projects, I have...

I agree that a good front end would be the best way to go, but this is a legacy system with 500 tables, 300 stored procedures and limited documentation. ...