For some time I was looking for a way to develop MS SQL connected application on Linux. I want to create a bridge between two applications and one of them stores data in Microsoft SQL. Since Kubuntu Linux is my development platform of choice I needed a way to be able to connect to the database from my system.
There are several obstacles to overcome, of which the most annoying is that you can’t put MS SQL on Linux directly. There might be a dozen solutions to this (like having an additional Windows/MS SQL server) I prefer to keep all the needed things on my dev box.
Since I have Windows 7 RC downloaded and there’s a free download of Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 I decided to put Virtual Box to hard work for me.