Connecting to remote SQL 2005 instance in Visual Studio 2005

Visual studio is a great tool. It's the complete package for developing a multitude of .Net applications-from Windows applications to web applications. We even use it in developing our Symbian OS applications.

But along with these great 'powers' come some shortcomings. I was using Visual studio to connect and manage a remote SQL 2005 instance in our network. I have done everything to properly configure SQL 2005 to accept remote connections. I have enabled TCP/IP and named pipes thru the SQL Configuration Manager.

But for some strange reasons, there were times when the IDE just could not connect to the remote SQL 2005 instance. The error message says that by default, SQL 2005 do not accept remote connections to the machine or something to that effect. I am pretty sure that I have enabled TCP/IP and named pipes on the remote SQL 2005 instance.

I'm no expert but I presumed that since the remote SQL connections uses TCP/IP, I assumed that the IDE was using a port to connect to the remote SQL 2005 instance. And if the IDE cannot connect to the SQL 2005 instance using the port it was supposed to be using, then probably that port was already open and currently being used by another application on my PC.

I use a lot of applications on my PC like Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, among other things. Then I decided not to load these applications (all apps which I knew were using ports) on my system.

Whoah! It worked! I've successfully connected to my remote DB server. Taking it a little bit further, by process of elimination, I narrowed them down to 3 apps: Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and my peer-to-peer application. One of these 3 was the culprit. Sometimes it was yahoo which prevented me from connecting my IDE to the remote DB server, other times it was MSN.

Is there a way to set the ports that these applications use? Or is there a way to configure Visual Studio such that it will use a different port to connect to remote DB servers? I don't have answers to these questions yet, but rest assured that I will do my best to come up with a good solution to this problem.