I've been working a little with SQL Server Compact Edition (which is a *very* cool product, by the way) lately. For those of you that haven't heard about SQL Compact: It's a small version of SQL Server that you host in-process in your .NET applications (it's just a couple of MBs) with full support for tables, indexes, transactions and so on (but no views, stored procedures or triggers). Much like SQLLite and Apache Derby, just better integrated with .NET.

So far I've been using Visual Studio to create and manage databases. This works great, but I didn't like to start up VS and everything just to peek into a database, and I've always felt more at home in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) when working with databases. Well, it turns out that SSMS can be used to manage SQL Compact databases as well! Cool, I didn't know that.

This is basically what you do:

Robert has some more on this on his blog.