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One little sentence...

For hours I had been struggling with a connection to a SQL Server database on our network... I had tried different connection strings, we had enabled TCP/IP and Named Pipes protocols on the server, I had "Allow remote connections" enabled, and nothing seemed to be working.

Finally I read this: "If the target SQL instance is a named instance, you also need to make sure SQL Browser is running on the target machine."

Doing that instantly allowed my application to connect. Thank you, Microsoft.

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