Question

In VB.NET CINT(VB.NET) is Integer.Parse in .NET Framework, what is the .NET equivalent for (VB.NET) CType?

Answer 1

CType is translated to a cast, which is a language level issue. In the emitted IL, there is no such thing as casting an object to a string, for instance. (Side note: if the type is a value type, it’ll translate to an unbox instruction, but it’s another story; The runtime does not distinguish between a reference to Foo and Bar reference types at all, for the sake of simplicity, I also ignored throwing InvalidCastException which is done by the castclass instruction).

Integer.Parse and CInt basically do some process on the source object (the string) and convert it to an equivalent integer. They do something. CType just instructs the language compiler about the type conversion.

For the sake of completeness, the IL equivalent of casting is:

1. castclass if the type is a reference type.
2. unbox if the type is a value type.

However, the Visual Basic compiler, translates the expression to a call to one of the Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.Conversions methods.