Making rails talk to SQL Server Express Edition

I had zero exposure to sqlserver before today. With the help of a dba and google :) I finally achieved the communication.  Here's what I did to achieve this -

Make an odbc connection - pointing to the db server, preferably make a sql server authentication user

Install the following gems

1. activerecord-odbc-adapter (2.0)
2. activerecord-sqlserver-adapter (2.3.8)
3. dbd-odbc (0.2.5)
4. dbi (0.4.5)
5. deprecated (2.0.1)

Further, I copied odbc.so and odbc_utf8.so files from http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc/i386-msvcrt-ruby-odbc.zip to .../ruby/1.8/i386-msvcrt even though exact directory was not found in the path. So, the files were eventually copied to ...\Ruby187\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mingw32

My database.yml file looks like this -

development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  mode: ODBC
  dsn:
  username: myUserName
  password: myPassword