I have two development teams, that come from different groups. Group A develops against a local default instance of Sql Server 2008 R2; Group B develops against a local named instance of Sql Server 2008 R2.
Is there a way to setup an alias such that both groups are coding against the same name. As it stands right now we have a war of connectionStrings as group B changes (local) to ./DEV and group A changes it back again.
In SQL Server Configuration Manager, under the SQL server native client configuration section there is a subsection called "aliases" you can add an alias into here that points to your named instance. You just use the alias as if it is the default instance on a server with the name of the alias. We use this exact model and have only one connection string that points to a standard alias. Each developer has the same alias name pointing to their own instance.
Personally, I'd make them all use the same box.
That said, you can set local aliases per developer's box using SQL Server Client tools.
Anything IP address or server name based (such as hosts file or DNS) will fail because instance names (and ports used) are different