Use TryCast in Visual Basic .NET 2005

Provided by Dave Juth, Senior Systems Architect

Use the TryCast keyword in Visual Basic .NET 2005 to simplify casting operations. This is a new VB.NET language feature that is similar to the C# as operator. For example, without TryCast, you might do this to get a value from a collection into a string variable:

  Dim someValue As String

 

  If myCollection.Items(0) <> Nothing Then

    someValue = CType(myCollection.Items(0), String)

  Else

    someValue = String.Empty

  End If

 

With TryCast, you can simplify this as follows:

  Dim someValue As String = TryCast(myCollection.Items(0), String)