I'm running SQL Server 2014 Express and using the SQL Server native drivers for the connection from my VS.net code. These are both on my Win10 machine.
Suddenly, in the last week or so, I've been receiving errors when my code attempts to connect. Of course the dialog doesn't allow cut-n-paste, so helpfully this is correct:
Named Pipes Provider error 40 - Could not open connection to SQL Server
This only happens about 1 in 10 times that I run the app. If I simply stop it and re-run it, it instantly connects. Another machine in the office running Win7 and SQL Server 2012 started showing the same behaviour, but fails all of the time now.
Note: yes, the server is running, the firewall is configured properly, as is the server's connections, the browser is up, etc. It's important to note that these would cause it to fail 100% of the time.
Does anyone have any ideas what's going on? Was there a recent driver update that might cause this perhaps?
