I've got something going on, and am in need of some direction as to where to look. On my home network, there should be a few different instances of SQL Sever Express running. One of them is fairly unreliable. I've discussed that in a different thread from a year or so back, but it's hard to rule out all the potential variables in that case. The instance is running on an older computer with a WiFi connection that uses somewhat dated technology. I can connect to it if computers are started in the right sequence, the stars are in alignment, and I sacrifice a chicken, but of late, the connection will drop if left unused for some length of time (unsure how long, but perhaps in the 15-30 minute range), and once dropped...I have to repeat the steps, and I'm running out of chickens.

To attempt to narrow down the issue, I decided to connect to a second, newer, computer also running over WiFi, but with modern security and Win11 (the other is Win10). I am attempting to connect from a third Win10 computer which is fairly new, though not as new as this new target for SQL Server. So, the original was Surface2, the new one with SQL Server is Surface7, and the one I am attempting to connect from is Desktop.

The program on Desktop is either one I wrote, or SSMS. In the program I wrote, I use the SQLDataSourceEnumerator like so:

Code:
Dim dSourceInstanct = SqlDataSourceEnumerator.Instance
mDTServers = dSourceInstanct.GetDataSources
This returns 0 records in the table. That's a bit of a surprise, since even Desktop has an instance of SQL Server Express on it, though no effort was made to expose that outside of Desktop.

My first thought was that I had Surface7 set up incorrectly, so I went into the SQL Manager and made sure that all the protocols were properly enabled. They were. I also added a rule to Windows firewall to allow the default SQL port. This hasn't changed anything.

In SSMS, a search for network servers first says "Retrieving data" then goes silent.

What am I not doing?