I've waited far too long to communicate this disappointing news to everyone, so here it is…
I'm not going to be releasing the SQL Express SP2 Bootstrapper manifests that I had discussed in a long ago blog posting. I'll spare you the sob story of my efforts to create this; suffice it to say that some requirements arose that complicated an official release and priorities changed over time. If you work in the software industry you know how it goes. So that brings us to…
My feeble backup plan
Most of the complications (ok, all of them) that I ran into were related to packaging up the manifests so they could be downloaded and installed. (Seriously, it's a long story, so don't ask.) The manifests themselves are pretty straight forward and only required some minor tweaks of the existing RTM manifests. There is nothing to stop me from sharing those updates with you in this blog and giving instructions on how to use them.
DIY SQL Express Bootstrapper
Technically, the bootstrapper, or the VS Generic Bootstrapper as I like to call it, refers to the technology created by the Visual Studio team to allow any developer to deliver specific sets of functionality as prerequisites that can be checked for and automatically installed by both ClickOnce and MSI based installers built with VS. The framework for building your own prerequisite is documented on MSDN in the topic Adding Custom Prerequisites. A more end to end treatment of the technology was printed in MSDN magazine back in 2004 in the article Use
It's been a long road filled with many shouts of "Are we there yet?", so I'm happy to say that yes, we're there now. SP2 has finally be released. You can find the SQL Express SP2 bits on the SQL Express download page along with several other related downloads. As of this writing, we were having some problems with our publication system, so you may see that the page still says SP1, but the Download links themselves are updated and will actually download SP2. We'll get the page updated as soon as possible so it actually says what you're downloading.
The most significant thing in SP2 for Express is that we have added the ability to provision the installing user as a SysAdmin on SQL Express, which is a requirement when you are running on Windows Vista with UAC turned on. You can read more about this in my previous blog post on the topic.
I mentioned quite awhile ago that we would be putting SP2 on Microsoft Update. Organizing this takes a few extra weeks, but you can expect that the SQL Express SP2 update will be offered via Microsoft Update by the end of March if not sooner. When updating from Microsoft Update, all instances of SQL Express will be updated together rather than having to do them one at a time as you have to do with the UI based version.
Finally, I'm working on creating a new manifest for the VS Generic Bootstrapper that will allow developers to embed SQL Express SP2 with their applications rather than the