I am receiving an error upon opening a project: "object reference not set to instance of an object". The project file does not open. The project type is SQL 2005. Environment is CTP4.

I'm using Visual Source Safe to store the code so I rolled back to a prior version of the project file that does open and began analyzing differences. It came down to the inclusion of a single stored procedure named: fp_getTableXSD. The purpose of that stored procedure is to generate an XSD for a given table structure; returning the lines of the document as a dataset for use by a middle tier program.

I had no difficulty adding this stored procedure with the tool. It edited fine, parsed fine, deployed fine and runs fine. No errors were reported checking it in to source safe either. Upon attempting to reload the project, however, the error "object reference not set ..." consistently occurs. There is no question that the problem occurs excatly when this stored procedure is added. The project contains other stored procedures which do not cause the error.

I thought the problem might be related to the "XSD" characters in the name. I changed the name to fp_getTableSchema in the source file and its reference in the project file xml. Same error.

It seems like the problem is somehow in the syntax of the sproc itself. That syntax is valid as far as SQL Server is concerned but it seems like the problem arises when the code is submitted to the design database. The code does contain http references as is required by XSD's but all of them are enapsulated as strings.

If you'd like the source code to this procedure so that you can attempt to add it to a test project on your end and debug from there, I'd be pleased to do so. The procedure has no external references to tables or sub-procedures so it should compile on any project.

For now I have excluded the reference to this object from my project but if there is "problem syntax" for stored procedures, it would be good to have it addressed in the next drop.