Application Name in a SQL Server connection string

Found an interesting feature - Application Name parameter in a connection string. It comes in very handy when you are using SQL Trace and trying to determine which application is connecting to your database, and Application Name parameter specifies what goes into Application name column in your trace file.

Sample connection string:

Data Source=myServer;Initial Catalog=myDB;User Id=myUsername;Password=myPassword;Application Name=myApp;

Why not ending URL with a slash resulted in 404 File not found error

Came accross an issue I have not encountered before - excluding trailing slash after URL.

The path to the web application I was accessing (sent to me in an e-mail) was http://ServerName/MainDirectory/Subdirectory. When I opened it in IE, I received 404 error - File not found.

The thing is that traditonally, when URL is pointing to a file, it does not include a trailing slash, but URL pointing to a directory does. So whenever the user does not put a trailing slash into the URL, the web server looks for a file with that name as opposed to a directory. leaving off a trailing slash results in a redirect if the file with that name is not found and goes to the folder with that name and looks for a default file in the directory. And that is why it takes slightly longer to load the URL without a trailing slash.

In my case I got an error and was quite puzzled as to why I get an error instead of redirect. I looked in IIS Manager and saw something strange - not only the application directory was configured as an application but all its subfolders. So that was why redirect didn't take place - web server did not see a subfolder as a subfolder but as an application.

I am going to look into it further and try to figure out why did developer configured each subdirectory as an application...