Question

Am just trying to understand why this exception throws.

Cannot implicitly convert type ‘System.DateTime?’ to ‘System.DateTime’. An explicit conversion exists (are you missing a cast?)

This is what am trying to do

story.BroadcastOn is a date time value am getting from database (eg: 23/03/2012 1:56 Pm).

Am trying to convert the time from 12 to 24 hrs format,this is what i was trying to do

   DateTime testconverttime = story.BroadcastOn;`//this is where it throws exception

so i have to use the parse to get rid of this like below to solve my issue but it doesn’t make sense to me

     if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(story.BroadcastOn.ToString()))
            {
                 DateTime localTime = story.BroadcastOn.Value;//Thanks all for the great suggestion.
                converttime = localTime.ToString("dd/MMM/yyyy HH:mm ", CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
            }

already i converted my 12 hrs to 24hrs but trying to understand the exception,some one will give me an explanation please.

Answer 1

DateTime testconverttime = story.BroadcastOn.Value;

It’s a nullable type (can have the null state also)

A nullable value type (DateTime is a value type), has the concept of the null value (no value). So if for example a column of datetime in database has nulls, then you can use Nullable<DateTime> or in short DateTime? to store the values which comes from that column.

About DateTime.ToString() and String.ToDateTime(): this is called yo-yo programming. You probably saw with Debuger that there is a representation of valid DateTime, which was giving by calling ToString(), but, in future, don’t try to cast a type to another type via this yo-yo technique.