Why can't I cast from a List<MyClass> to List<object>?

Question

I have a List of objects, which are of my type QuoteHeader and I want to pass this list as a list of objects to a method which is able to accept a List<object>.

My line of code reads...

Tools.MyMethod((List<object>)MyListOfQuoteHeaders);

But I get the following error at design time...

Cannot convert type 'System.Collections.Generic.List<MyNameSpace.QuoteHeader>' 
to 'System.Collections.Generic.List<object>'

Do I need to do anything to my class to allow this? I thought that all classes inherit from object so I can't understand why this wouldn't work?

Answer 1

The reason this is not legal is because it is not safe. Suppose it were legal:

List<Giraffe> giraffes = new List<Giraffe>();
List<Animal> animals = giraffes; // this is not legal; suppose it were.
animals.Add(new Tiger());  // it is always legal to put a tiger in a list of animals

But "animals" is actually a list of giraffes; you can't put a tiger in a list of giraffes.

In C# this is, unfortunately, legal with arrays of reference type:

Giraffe[] giraffes = new Giraffe[10];
Animal[] animals = giraffes; // legal! But dangerous because...
animals[0] = new Tiger(); // ...this fails at runtime!

In C# 4 this is legal on IEnumerable but not IList:

List<Giraffe> giraffes = new List<Giraffe>();
IEnumerable<Animal> animals = giraffes; // Legal in C# 4
foreach(Animal animal in animals) { } // Every giraffe is an animal, so this is safe

It is safe because IEnumerable<T> does not expose any method that takes in a T.

To solve your problem you can:

• Create a new list of objects out of the old list.
• Make the method take an object[] rather than a List<object>, and use unsafe array covariance.
• Make the method generic, so it takes a List<T>
• Make the method take IEnumerable
• Make the method take IEnumerable<object> and use C# 4.