IEnumerable.Cast won't work even if an explicit cast operator is defined?

Question

I have an explicit conversion defined from type Bar to type Foo.

public class Bar
{
  public static explicit operator Foo(Bar bar)
         


        

Answer 1

As all other answers pointed type is not known in compile time since Cast method is not generic. It holds type of object and makes a explicit cast to T. this fails because you don't have conversion operator from object to Foo. And that is not possible also.

Here is a work around using dynamics in which cast will be done in runtime.

public static class DynamicEnumerable
{
    public static IEnumerable DynamicCast(this IEnumerable source)
    {
        foreach (dynamic current in source)
        {
            yield return (T)(current);
        }
    }
}

Then use it like

 var result = bars.DynamicCast();//this works