title: Visual Studio 2013 connection to local MySQL Database
body: <p>Getting right to the point, I'm learning Visual Basic, and I want to connect Visual Studio 2013 Express to a local MySQL database that I have running on the default 3306 port.  For now I would be ecstatic just to have it show up in the explorer for me to play around and see what one can do with it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>The Current State of Things:</strong></p>
  
  <p>So, I went opened up the "Data Sources" sidebar and tried to set up a connection to the database:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/cEDV6.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>The credentials and db name at the bottom are both correct, by the way.
  Yet, "Test Connection" laughs in my face with this generic, unhelpful error:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/VRwAV.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>So I do some Googling to figure out where I messed up my server's my.ini file. These are the only edits I've made from the default config:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>bind-address: 127.0.0.1</li>
  <li>skip-networking: true</li>
  <li>enable-named-pipe: true</li>
  <li>port: 3306</li>
  <li>socket: /tmp/mysql.sock</li>
  <li>skip-grant-tables</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>All in attempt to remove as many possible connection hindrances as I can, to the best of my knowledge. 
  I made sure the server is running, restarted the service after every config change, and I can access the database from MySQL Workbench just fine. I'm at a loss :( so if you have an idea, lets hear it! :)</p>
  
  <p><strong><em>If I left out anything useful, or if you need more info, I'll get it for you!</em></strong></p>