Firstly thanks for all the replies. I verified settings and everything looks good. We verified the firewall is turned off and the ports are not blocked. I successfully connected from my desktop to the instance on the server using sqlcmd -S np:\\host\pipe\mssql$instance\sql\query -E (we are connecting using Integrated Security). I also tried the same command on the server using the dot and it worked fine??? So I was able to connect using np from sqlcmd but the developer still cannot connect using this Visual Basic 2010 Studio, we still get the named pipes error??? I also restarted the SQL Browser service. We only have named instances on this box.