Solving "The requested URL was not found on this server."

In my busy schedule of multiple projects in Multiple programming languages, I upgraded my laptop and installed all the software's and tools needed in my day today programming. Having worked for about a month with the new laptop, mostly programming MSSQL SERVER and .NET 2012, I decided to finish my small payroll system I had started but never got the time to finish.

The project was in php using laravel 4 framework. So the first shock I got was when I attempted to load one of the pages and I got "The requested URL was not found on this server." I quickly checked apache error log and found the following error and which pointed me to the rewrite_module setting that I had not enabled.

And voila, my page opened. Hope this post helps someone else.

MYSQL C# string and byte confusion

While creating an application with C# and MYSQL as the back end  i encountered a problem where I expected the c# to return value as a string but then ended up getting  a {byte[]} as the result.

To get around this issue, and after lots of googling, i discovered the problem could easily be sorted from the connection string. Just add  "respect binary flags=false;" in your connection string. i.e

Server=svrName;Database=dbName;Uid=Usrname;Pwd=pwdName;respect binary flags=false;