Disclaimer: Nobody paid me for this post. I am not endorsed by anyone in any way. Although, I do accept donations :D.

I’ve been using tools from xSQL for a few months now. I have to say, I love those guys.

There are the three products I use the most.

xSQL Data Compare, which is a typical application for synchronizing data between databases. The cool part is that they have a free edition for smaller databases. It’s great when you’re just starting a project and there not many tables, sps… and yet, you still have to continuously keep data synchronized between versions.

The other tool that I absolutely adore is xSQL Script Executor. All it does is runs numerous SQL scripts as batch. If you use VSS for storing all your tables, sps and relationship scripts you will really appreciate this tool. Thanks to it you can rebuild whole database in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, I believe this is the only tool like that on the market (meaning, google didn’t find anything that was even similar J ).

Finally, a truly innovative approach to working with DBs: xSQL Object Search. It allows you to search for objects (tables, sps and such) based on their name. This tool is invaluable when you get an existing project that uses behemoth of a database, and you have to locate some related objects (say, you want to fix some functionality of the system).

On the final note, did I mention that xSQL Script Executor and xSQL Object Search are totally free!!!

This is a quick tip. Below is the code that you can use when you want to find what's the name of the Virtual Directory.

string virtualDirectory =AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName;

virtualDirectory = virtualDirectory.Substring(virtualDirectory.LastIndexOf("/"));

virtualDirectory = virtualDirectory.Substring(0, virtualDirectory.IndexOf("-"));

Notes: This has been tested in IIS 6. If you run this code in ASP.NET Dev Server you'll get an exception as CurrentDomain.FrienlyName will not contain any '/' (no virtual directory).