Convert vs. CType

Question

I am somewhat confused about presence of two seemingly identical VB.NET functions: CType(args) and Convert.ToType(args). I'm fairly new to .NET and VB in general, so I'm not quite sure whether one of them is a VB6 legacy or they actually have different purposes / uses / limitations. Is one of the them newer / safer? Are there reasons to use one but not the other?

Cheers! = )

Ontario

Please stop putting the programming language in the question title... that's what tags are for – Mccaleb

Won't do it again. I've seen others do that, thought it might be a good idea. Thanks for the feedback. – Ontario

Answer 1

CType is from VB6 times and is not the best when it comes to efficiency. You should be able to use Convert.ToXxxx() methods for convertion and TryCast() and DirectCast() for casting instead of CType().

Aristocracy

Not true. CType was never in the VB6. I think you are confusing this with CInt, CDbl, etc. – Diploid

Answer 2

See this page on MSDN. (Conversion Functions, CType, DirectCast, and System.Convert Section).

The conclusion of that section is as follows:

Recommendation: For most conversions, use the intrinsic language conversion keywords (including CType) for brevity and clarity and to allow compiler optimizations when converting between types. Use DirectCast for converting Object to String and for extracting value types boxed in Object variables when the embedded type is known (that is, coercion is not necessary).

Diploid