Casting ints to enums in C#

Question

There is something that I cannot understand in C#. You can cast an out-of-range int into an enum and the compiler does not flinch. Imagine this

Answer 1

Not sure about why, but I recently found this "feature" incredibly useful. I wrote something like this the other day

// a simple enum
public enum TransmissionStatus
{
    Success = 0,
    Failure = 1,
    Error = 2,
}
// a consumer of enum
public class MyClass 
{
    public void ProcessTransmissionStatus (TransmissionStatus status)
    {
        ...
        // an exhaustive switch statement, but only if
        // enum remains the same
        switch (status)
        {
            case TransmissionStatus.Success: ... break;
            case TransmissionStatus.Failure: ... break;
            case TransmissionStatus.Error: ... break;
            // should never be called, unless enum is 
            // extended - which is entirely possible!
            // remember, code defensively! future proof!
            default:
                throw new NotSupportedException ();
                break;
        }
        ...
    }
}

question is, how do I test that last case clause? It is completely reasonable to assume someone may extend TransmissionStatus and not update its consumers, like poor little MyClass above. Yet, I would still like to verify its behaviour in this scenario. One way is to use casting, such as

[Test]
[ExpectedException (typeof (NotSupportedException))]
public void Test_ProcessTransmissionStatus_ExtendedEnum ()
{
    MyClass myClass = new MyClass ();
    myClass.ProcessTransmissionStatus ((TransmissionStatus)(10));
}