Question

I am trying to cast a char as follows:

while (Reader.Read())
{
  VM VMResult = new VM();
  VMResult.status = (char)Reader["status"];
  VMList.Add(VMResult);
}

Then comes the fun part: Specified Cast is not Valid.

VMResult.status is a char

The returned data is a char(1) in sql

I assume there must be a difference in the C# / SQL char terminology.

What do you think?

Answer 1

I assume there must be a difference in the C# / SQL char terminology.

That’s correct. A char in sql server is a fixed length character string. It can be nullable.

A char in .net is a structure that represents a single character as a UTF-16 code unit. It cannot be null since its a structure

There is no fixed length character string .Net unless you consider a char array or byte array a fixed length string.

Since most of the .net ecosystem has better support for strings than chars, char arrays or byte arrays, you’re much better off just using the string that gets returned for the char(x) fields.