FIX: Visual Basic Crashes When Appending a New Column to an Existing Table

Microsoft Visual Basic crashes when appending a newly-created column to a table by setting the ParentCatalog property of a column to an active catalog and adding it to an existing table.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

This problem has been corrected in MDAC 2.5 and later.

Steps to Reproduce Behavior

1. Start a new Standard EXE project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default. Reference either the Microsoft ADO Ext. 2.5 for DDL and Security object library, or the Microsoft ADO Ext. 2.1 for DDL and Security object library.
2. On the Tools menu, select Options. On the General tab, make sure you do not have Break on All Errors selected.
3. Double-click Form1. Copy and paste the following code in the Form_Load() event:

   Private Sub Form_Load()
       Dim cat As New ADOX.Catalog
       Dim col1 As New ADOX.Column
       Dim col2 As New ADOX.Column
       Dim tbl As New ADOX.Table
       
       cat.ActiveConnection = "Provider=Microsoft.JET.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VB98\nwind.mdb"
       On Error Resume Next
       cat.Tables.Delete "Table1"
       On Error GoTo 0
       tbl.Name = "Table1"
       tbl.Columns.Append "Column1", adSmallInt
       
       cat.Tables.Append tbl
       
       col1.Name = "Column2"
       col1.ParentCatalog = cat
       col1.Properties.Refresh
       cat.Tables("Table1").Columns.Append col1    'VB crashed here
   End Sub
   						

   Modify the Data Source path to point to a valid .mdb file.
4. Save and run the project. If you are using ADO 2.5, then the project completes successfully. If you are using ADO 2.1, then the application terminates abnormally.