I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 Schema Compare for deploying database changes from one environment to another (development to staging, staging to production), but I have ran into an annoying bug that I would love some enlightenment on.
I am trying to compare a database on our staging SQL server to our production server and after selecting the two databases and clicking “Compare”, Visual Studio immediately crashes.
Problem
signature:
Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
Problem Signature 01: devenv.exe
Problem Signature 02: 10.0.30319.1
Problem Signature 03: 4ba1fab3
Problem Signature 04: Microsoft.Data.Schema.Sql
Problem Signature 05: 10.0.0.0
Problem Signature 06: 4ba1d812
Problem Signature 07: 2f6c
Problem Signature 08: 24
Problem Signature 09: System.NullReferenceException
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional
information about the problem:
LCID: 1033
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What’s odd about this particular problem, is that other databases on the staging server can be compared to their production counterparts without problem. Additionally, this particular database was able to be backed up and restored to our development environment and a schema compare could be ran between development and production.
If anyone has any tips on this, please leave a comment explaining. If you’re having this issue, please note that as a workaround, it seems to be working to backup and restore the database. I also plan on posting this to Microsoft as well and I will update the post if I find anything.
Nicholas Barger's Blog 
Any solution to this issue? I am having the same problem.
Hi,
I’m getting this issue too, after moving MSSQL 2008 R2 to my D drive. Don’t have a solution yet, but am going to try checking for updates for VS2010 and if that doesn’t work, reinstalling VS.
Could also be similar to SSAS, when you rename a db there, the name changes but not the ID, and then they get out of sync and deployment errors start popping up: I think the SQL instance ID is out of sync after the reinstall.
will update when I’ve got it working.
H
We think it may actually be due to the particular database server having filestream turned on. We are going to experiment with backing up the server and then turning filestream off. Will let you know when we get around to testing this.