Question

Seems like we could just have a normal statically checked assignment. I’m not sure I see the advantage in this case. What am I missing?

Answer 1

The issue here is that foreach was designed prior to generics, which didn’t exist until .NET 2.0. With .NET 1.1, if you used a collection class, the IEnumerator interface’s Current property always returns System.Object.

By having foreach do the cast, you could write:

foreach(string item in collection)

Instead of having to explicitly write:

foreach(object temp in collection)
{
     string item = (string)temp;

Granted, with .NET 2, this is not really an issue anymore.