So, I manage to bump into an article by Sam Gentile who is complaining about SQL Express.
He complains there's no manual, docs, sample database or user interface.
I do believe there's a lack of documentation - it could do with coverage of the new features, however MSDE had no user interface, sample database or documentation. It's a royalty free, application deployable database - not SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition.
The product is a good year away at least! And given what has already been written in various weblog entries and comments you can get the key parts to work fine. Creating/importing a sample database is also simple enough as to be a good entry level test of the user to see if they actually should be playing with the product.
Beta means Beta, not "finished product to try out" - if will always take some effort to get the most out of a beta.
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