john.arnott (9/22/2009)
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The important point here would seem to be that the environment from which a query is run can affect its output. I haven't tried embedding this sort of parsing mess into a program, but wouldn't be surprised if SQL Server treated it in yet another way.
Actually, the important point here is that Visual Studio rewrites your query before sending it to the server. I've run into this several times, and more than once it's actually caused perfectly good queries to fail. That's one reason why I rarely use it.
I believe you'll find that SSMS is not parsing your code beyond utility commands like "GO", and if you sent the raw code programmatically to the server, you'd get the same results as from SSMS.