[quantass]

I've installed the MSDE SQL Server package onto my Windows 2000 Pro system. Visual Studio .NET 2003 (C#) is my development tool of choice and am using the FCL's SQLConnection class to connect to the "Pubs" database:

SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection (@"server=localhost\NetSDK;uid=;pwd=;database=pubs");

When installing the MSDE package I used the following parameters within the Setup.ini:

INSTANCENAME="NetSDK"
SAPWD="a"

Unfortunately I keep getting back the error message:
SQL Server does not exist or access denied. I currently have the following Services listed: MSSQL$NETSDK [Started - Automatic], MSSQLServerAdHelper [Stopped - Manual], SQLAgent$NETSDK [Started - Automatic], Distributed Transaction Coordinator [Stopped - Manual]. There is a "SQL Server Service Manager" app in the tasktray however there are no server or services listed in its dropdown boxes.

What am i doing wrong? Is there a clear way to identifying what SQL Server is running and its parameters? I cant seem to find any UI that presents the SQL Server currently running on my machine with properties.