>I've been working on a Twitter account management program / feed reader. I have it to the point that I want to start offering it up for some testing. And I'm trying to work out the best strategy for deploying the database.
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>Originally I had thought of downgrading the database to CE, but I tried that this weekend and found out that CE doesn't' seem to support Identity increment. CE also lacks some other features I wanted to be able to use latter, and since it can rapidly grow into a rather massive database, I decided to keep it as some form of SQL express database for now.
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>The current database is in SQL Express 2005 and I'm using Entity Framework for access to it. I use 2005 instead of 2008 for my coding because I can seamlessly transfer my data between the Express version I use for development and my company server which is the Standard 2005 version.
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>So here are my questions...
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>Has anyone had any experience supporting both the 2005 and 2008 versions of SQL Server entity framework? (Since the database was designed for 2005 it seems like it should be do able.)

I had the same situation when developing from a SQL2005 database and deploying to access SQL2000.
IIRC the only problem we had was with a couple of field datatypes : nvarchar(MAX) on 2005 was ntext (?) on 2000.
I hacked the edmx xml to change the type to ntext but the most important thing was changing the ProviderManifestToken attribute (in the StorageModel/Schema element) to reflect the earlier SQL version. Once I'd done that it ran fine on both 2005 and 2000 with the same edmx.
I'd assume you'd be less likely to hit problems between 2008/2005 - but there's probably no harm in setting the ProviderManifestToken to "2005" anyway.....

>I can handle the install of SQL Express with no problems (already tested) but what is the best way to install AND maintain the database? (There seems to be a number of ways to go on this.)

I guess the best approach might depend on the size of the DB - but I still wouldn't know what to recommend :-}

Best,
Viv