It is not often that I have a well documented program hang me up for a few hours, but SQL Express had me at just that. What I needed to do was host the 64 bit database on a 64 bit Windows Server 2008 machine that would then receive connections from a remote host through the ODBC.

Windows does a not-so-friendly job at telling you remote connections are off by default (who reads those messages anyway), but within a few minutes I was aware of the issue. Microsoft advised to use the surface area utility, enable remote connections and restart the service. No problem, clicked what I needed, restarted and moved on assuming all would work well.

No remote connections later and I am pounding my head looking at configurations. Remote port is 1433, interfaces seem to be active, but not enabled? Experimented using different ports, no named pipes, named pipes, no firewalls among many other combinations and still no luck. I did the few things Microsoft recommended and got nothing but SQL database not available, services not listening remotely..etc, etc.. I later stumbled on some forums advising that the native client may be the thing giving me issues. I was advised then to download the 64 bit native client from the feature pack for express 2005. All that did was roll me back a revision or two on the driver and still left me useless.

So at this point hours of time have been wasted and I am annoyed. I open up the command prompt, issue my netstat and like I had seen all along, no port listening as expected. Call me dumb, but maybe I thought the named pipes would just work or that the port was dynamically getting assigned. Whatever the case, I did not let not seeing a port stop me from moving on. After all that work I finally thought it was time to focus on getting an active listening port to show up. My last and final change was hard coding the 1433 port assignment within the TCP/IP configuration properties. 

To get to this you need to open the configuration manager. Go to SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration, Protocols for SQLEXPRESS and then TCP/IP. If you go into that then you should see an IP address tab. Click that, scroll to the bottom and there should be an IP/All where you can define a port. Define your port, restart the service and you will be good to go. I really hope this helps someone out because the rest of the Internet appears to be clueless with this issue.