I was reading Kathleen’s post about what a C# developer needs to know about VB and thought I should clarify the bit about Booleans converted to numerics. A Boolean in VB when converted to an integer type numeric, will be zero or the bitwise Not of zero.
This table summarizes the value of True when converted to integer types using VB’s built in CType operator, or specific operator:
| Type | CLR Type | Hex value | Decimal | specific operator |
| Byte | Byte | &HFF | 255 | CByte |
| Short | Int16 | &HFFFF | -1 | CShort |
| Integer | Int32 | &HFFFFFFFF | -1 | CInt |
| Long | Int64 | &HFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF | -1 | CLng |
| SByte | SByte | &HFF | -1 | CSByte |
| UShort | UInt16 | &HFFFF | 65535 | CUShort |
| UInteger | UInt32 | &HFFFFFFFF | 4294967295 | CUInt |
| ULong | Uint64 | &HFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF | 18446744073709551615 | CULng |
As you can see, the Hex values are all bits set.
It’s up to you if you use the more succinct specific operator, such as CInt(value), rather than CType(vale, Int32). I tend to use Cint. I do go out of my way to use CUInt … I’ll let you guess why ;)
For C# people, living in a world devoid of such niceties, you can continue to rely heavily on the Convert class, even if the result is incorrect as far as bitwise representation goes ;)
And for more insight into operators in VB, see my article in Visual Studio Magazine.