SQL Server troubles

This post is part of a series about my experiences building a PHP app for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7 for the European WinPHP Challenge 2009 which is sponsored by iBuildings, Microsoft and Leaseweb.

I'm now at the stage where I'm writing code and came across an error:

Message: 2 [Microsoft][SQL Native Client]
    Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [2]. 

That seemed a little odd, so I fired up the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and logged in with the credentials that I'm using in the web app. It let me log in, so I went to click on the Databases item in the Object Explorer and got this message:

sqlmgnt_error.jpg

Any ideas? All I've found when googling is suggestions to reinstall...

If you would like to comment on this article, please ping me on twitter.
If your response won't fit into 140 characters, write a blog post and then ping me!