Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Understanding Implicit Conversions

Previously we discussed the System.Object class. As you may remember, such a class is the root in the class hierarchy. That said, you can assign both reference types and value types to an Object instance because they both inherit from System.Object. Consider the following lines of code:

Dim anInt As Object = 10 Dim onePerson As Object = New Person

The first line assigns a value type (Integer) to an Object whereas the second one assigns an instance of the Person class to an Object. Visual Basic 2010 always enables such assignments because they are always safe. What is unsafe is trying to assign an Object to a strongly typed instance, such as assigning Object to an instance of the Person class. This is quite obvious, ...