linq2sql When working with dbml files: Error 396 Name cannot begin with the '<' character, hexadecimal value 0x3C. Line 2, position 2. Just ran into an issue where I couldn’t open a dbml file. Didn’t find any good answers on Google so I thought I’d share. I broken the dbml.layout file by not cleaning it properly during a merge, all I had to do was delete the content