Today I've been trying out one of the Starter Kits that can be used with Visual Studio 2005. I'm using the Club Web Site Starter Kit. This starter kit expects to run with SQL Express. I don't have SQL Express on my computer, as I run SQL Server 2005. I don't work so much on developing applications that use SQL Express anyway, so I didn't want to install it. But what should I do? The app would not compile without a database.
After searching for a bit, I found a blog post called "ASP.NET 2.0 and the Provider Model, without SQL Express" by Bil Simser. It's a very detailed description on how to change the connections strings to make the application accept a database in SQL Server and not SQL Express, and also what you need to do to the database to be able to use the new AspNetSqlMembershipProvider (run aspnet_regsql.exe).
I followed Bil Simser's directions and now I'm running the Club Web Site Starter Kit app on my pc. I did have to create the database manually in SQL Server, but the kit contains a sql script file that does all the coding.
Bil mentions a blog post about the same topic from Scott Guthrie, called "Configuring ASP.NET 2.0 Application Services to use SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005". That post can be found here.
Also, when the site is up and running, you might want to do some administrative tasks to it. On your dev box, the "ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool" can be started by clicking on the ASP.NET configuration button in your solution pane menu. If you want to move everything to i.e. a production server, you want to have a different way of accessing that administration site. R. Aaron Zupancic has written a post on "ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool on a Server", which describes what you need to do when you move your web app.