Greetings Kevin,

Thanks! One of these posts caused me to take a closer look at the path in the exception. For some reason the |DataDirectory| named pipe in the connection string in the web.config was pointing to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common\Ide. Once I put the hard-coded path to the .mdf file it worked fine. To quote Bart Simpson "Ay Carumba!"

Regards,

E.R.

>E.R.
>
>>Can you connect to a .mdf file in the app_data folder to generate business objects? The connection string in the web.config doesn't work in the business object generator. I didn't see anything in the help that addressed this.
>
>A quick Google search tells me this problem is rampant with many different solutions! Here are a few links you may find helpful:
>
>http://blogs.advantaje.com/blog/kevin/Net/2005/11/15/SQLExpress-Problems.html?page=comments
>
>http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=110252&SiteID=17
>
>http://sjbdeveloper.blogspot.com/2006/06/web-application-projects-and-sql.html
>
>Best Regards,