Okay, so this is going to sound stupid or trivial, but please, humor me. I am writing a personal project in C# using Visual Studio 2013 Express and some of the code is going to hit a SQL database. Before I hit other databases, I want to test it locally and make sure that it performs as expected. However, I can't seem to find any tutorial that either is complete or works in order to get a SQL database up from nothing.

First, I tried installing SqlLocalDb 2014. Even after the tools I can't figure out where there is a UI that I can type in scripts to create a database. 

I tried the directions here: <http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-SQL-Server-Database>
But at step 3, the option to create a database is greyed out, and searching that issue got me nowhere.

I've tried adding a new SQL Server Database Project to my solution. This looked like it would work exactly, but when I designed the table I couldn't figure out how to actually deploy/publish it so I could connect to it. I get a SQL file, and I can't figure out what to do with it from there. I found instructions on how to publish it, but it seemed the only directions were to publish to a remote server (and I want to use a local one).

I tried the instructions here (yes, I know they're for 2012): <http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms233763(VS.110).aspx> but I can't find the Server Explorer / Database Explorer. I found the Server Explorer (where my table doesn't appear) and the SQl Server Object Explorer, where my table does appear but I can't figure out how to populate it with dummy data or how to connect to it.

This should not be this hard and I feel like I'm missing something obvious. Thank you in advance for any help.