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Home > Take Up Code > 34: C# Casting. Only Frogs Can Be Frogs.
Podcast: Take Up Code
Episode:

34: C# Casting. Only Frogs Can Be Frogs.
Category: Technology
Duration: 00:06:42
Publish Date: 2016-01-06 23:30:52
Description:

C# also supports both implicit and explicit casts and gives you some different choices when you need to switch types. Plus you have a runtime that’s ready to throw an InvalidCastException. But even if you don’t hit an exception, there’re some things you should be aware of. This is still casting.

This is a short episode that builds on the previous episode and describes how you cast types in C#. You don’t have initializer lists or named casts like in C++. But you do have a runtime that will help make sure that your casts are well behaved. If not, the runtime will throw an InvalidCastException.

You have four options to perform casts in C#:

  1. You can use C-style casts.
  2. You can define an operator in your class that knows how to return the type you want to cast to.
  3. You can implement the IConvertible interface if you want your class to be able to be converted to base types such as int.
  4. You can implement a Parse or a TryParse method if you want to be able to convert to your class from a string. This of course requires that your class be able to generate a suitable string in the first place that the Parse method can use to reconstruct your class.

And you also have two keyword operators in C# to help you test and cast types. The “is” operator allows you to test if an instance really is another type. And the “as” operator allows you to perform a cast but if the cast fails, then instead of throwing an InvalidCastException, the “as” operator will return null.
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