Stephen Sawyer
Partner
Steve is a partner with Geeks and Gurus, Inc., a software development and IT services company in Detroit, MI. Steve has been working as a professional programmer since 1988. Co-author of two books on Visual FoxPro programming, including (with Jim Booth) Effective Techniques for Application Development with Visual FoxPro, Steve is a former columnist and has written numerous articles on programming over the past ten years. Steve has been a Microsoft developer MVP from 1997-2002, a Microsoft Certified Professional since 1995, and is a founding member and President of the Detroit Area Fox User Group.
Articles Authored
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Casting Reference Types in Visual Basic .NET
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - January/February
Casting, or converting the value of a token from one type of data to another is common to most (if not all) programming languages. Visual Basic has long had a series of casting functions, such as CStr, CInt, Clong, etc. to allow conversion of one type of variable to another. While the idea of casting is simple and familiar when discussed in the context of a simple variable containing a value (.NET value types), the meaning and behavior of a cast is less clear when discussed in the context of objects.