Using MySQL with Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition

Sunday December 14, 2008

Over the last 12 years I have helped a friend of mine Brian create an application for managing dog shows, according to the UK Kennel Club rules. Not exactly coding at the speed of light...but the application has been successfully used many times and he learnt a lot about programming. It was originally written in Delphi and it's now being converted to C#. However it uses MySQL and he wanted to do it with Visual C# 2008 Express Edition which does not support MySQL out of the box.

So last week I got MySQL working with the Express Edition of Visual C# 2008. It was too good an opportunity to miss out on, so I've written it up as a mini tutorial, just 4 pages long and of course provided the code. The only thing it doesn't have is the database though I have included the table definition we use with the source code. That file is called dogs.sql. Note you will need to have downloaded and installed MySQL to test it. Rather than reinvent that particular wheel, I suggest you look at Mike Chapple's articles on MySQL.