Can Visual Studio Express 2008 connect to MySQL?

I've installed MySQL .NET connector but it's not shown in data source options开发者_运维百科 to connect in Visual Studio Express Edition.

Is this possible? If so, what steps can I take?

There are only two options shown in VB Express for data connections (this is intentional); Access and MS SQL. You will need to manually setup the connections or upgrade Visual Studio. Here is an older tutorial for VB.Net 2005 Express and MySQL, but the steps followed should be the same (VBMySQLTutorial).

You won't actually need the tooling to connect to MySQL. You can simply write your VB.NET Code to use MySqlCommand and MySqlConnection objects.