HOWTO: Configure SQL Server 2005 to allow remote connections

I know it doesn't seem a very hard task, but it really took me quite a lot of time to configure a SQL Server 2005 instance running on Windows XP SP2 machine to allow remote connections.

This KB article describes step by step what you have to do to be able to connect remotely to a SQL Server 2005.

In my case, there were two problems:

1. I disabled SQL Server Browser service (which has to be running if you want to use a named instance),
2. I didn't know that in Windows Firewall you can create exceptions for particular applications (and not only ports).