I'm not convinced you need full-text search to check for equality in a username. Do you think you could use the following instead of CONTAINS
?
SELECT username FROM dbo.users WHERE username = @username;
If you absolutely feel you need full-text search, then:
- You need Express Edition with Advanced Services; I don't think Visual Studio ships with that edition. You can download that here (
SQLEXPRADV_x64_ENU.exe
). - You'll need to use DDL to create your full-text catalog and indexes, as I point out in this answer, as there are bugs in the UI that still seem to have gone unresolved. If you download (1) you'll have a version of Management Studio Express that might have fixes but will certainly be fully functional (the SP1 release was the first version of SSMS Express that has all the functionality of the full version, which may explains why it is greyed out).
Example:
CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG my_catalog;
GO
CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX
ON dbo.users(username LANGUAGE 1033)
KEY INDEX uq_un ON my_catalog;