VB.Net C# Designtime Error ~ ‘.ctor’ is not a valid identifier.

Tired of searching you project for that string? The answer is simple, which was proposed by Vladmir from Serbia on MSDN. The name of your class or form shares it’s name with a function or subroutine contained within that class. Like below:

public class Form1

private sub Form1()

…

end sub

end class

Changing the name of the method will fix this issue.

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Altering a Table – “Saving Changes is Not Permitted”

So you may or may not know this. SQL Server 2008 and up have a restrictive setting for altering tables (to prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot). To get around this message, go to Tools>Options>Designers; then un-check “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation”.

That is well and good but has lead me to ask the question, what changes will require table re-creation? Here is what I found:

• Changing column sizes.
• Setting a column to allow nulls or to not allow nulls.
• Changing a column type to a type that does not convert well. Int to bigint is fine but nvarchar to text requires table re-creation.
• Changing foreign key constraints.
• Modifying identity properties of columns.

Here is something that you can do though:

• Add  a column and it’s properties.
• Delete a column, kind of strange since this would be destroying data. What gives Microsoft?