Create alter procedure должна быть первой инструкцией в пакетном запросе

Often I wish to do the reverse of what you are asking. For example if the user has customized a procedure, and I don’t want to lose their changes, yet I want to apply a uniform update script for all my clients, I’d like to be able to do something like the following:

if not exists ( select * from sys.objects 
            where name='myProc' and objectproperty(object_id,'IsProcedure')=1 )
create proc myProc 
as begin
  -- proc stmts here
end
go

This logic would allow me to create something only if it DOESN’T exist, but to my great frustration, SQL Server prevents this too.

I get around this problem easily enough as follows:

if not exists ( select * from sys.objects 
            where name='myProc' and objectproperty(object_id,'IsProcedure')=1 )
exec('create proc myProc 
as begin
  -- proc stmts here
  declare @object int = 0
end')
go

By passing the create proc command as a string and placing it in an exec statement we circumvent the stupid rule that prevents one from doing this in the first place.

I am trying to execute SQL Script file in my bin folder with code from Visual Studio, before now it was working fine when I was using SQL Server 2012, I recently installed SQL server 2019 and I created the script using SQL Server 2019, when the application tries to execute the script I get the error

create/alter procedure must be the first statement in the query batch

I went to a friend who has SQL Server 2012 and created the script with his computer, it worked but when I create it with newer version I get the error, this is my code to read the script file :

public static string ReadDBFile(string path)
{
     string str;
     StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(path);
     str = reader.ReadToEnd();
     str = str.Replace("GO", "");
     reader.Close();
     return str;
}

Here is where am executing the script file :

cmd.CommandText = ReadDBFile(Application.StartupPath + "/scriptfile.sql");
cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

I am sure this has to do with upgrade of SQL Server, any clue on how I could get this to work?