I mocked up your example and experienced no problems. Are you sure it is not something else giving null reference? Something in the Checked event handler probably because setting default to checked will make the handler run.

Reference this SO question stackoverflow.com/questions/20454438/…

Are you expecting the PDF to open on your client machine? That code will try to run on the server and the person using the website will never see it.

That xml heirarchy wouldn't fit into one table. If It weren't for the many to one <Subjects> you could probably craft an xml schema that would load it into one table.

Is that exactly the xml being returned? PublisherText is not closed properly.

VS =Visual Studio, SSMS = SQL Server Management Studio. These are the tools you are using. I'm trying to determine if the identity you connect with in VS does not have rights to ALTER. Do this query in both tools and compare results: SELECT CURRENT_USER

Are you using the same SQL or Windows identity in VS as you used in SSMS?

Most likely it is not the fault of your code. By default remote connections to SQL Server are blocked. You may need to configure the server itself blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlexpress/archive/2005/05/05/415084.aspx

It can be difficult to provide an answer that just works when the page has so many moving parts. Try stepping through with the debugger and inspect the events and data for clues to what is wrong.

You don't actually use those parameters in this case so you could call it from other places like BindGrid(Nothing, Nothing). Or you could create another Sub that has all the code from BindGrid and have one line in BindGrid that calls it.

I can see right off that you didn't add the required event handler parameters to BindGrid. In my example I show the use of 'sender' and 'e'.