Question

class Person
{
   string Name;
   int Age;
}

I want to be able to cast a string to Person implicitly like following

var mrFoo = "Foo" as Person;

I know I can do the following by defining implicit casting

Person mrFoo = "Foo";

But I’m specific to use “as” operator

Answer 1

No, you can’t do that. The “as” operator never uses user-defined conversions – only reference conversions and unboxing conversions. Basically, the reference in question already has to be the right type.

Personally I would strongly advise you to stay away from conversion operators (especially implicit ones) for the vast majority of cases. Usually having a conversion method is clearer, e.g. Person.FromString(...).