Trying to cast a boxed int to byte

Question

Code to illustrate :

        int i = 5;
        object obj = i;
        byte b = (byte)obj; // X

When run, this generates a System.InvalidC

Answer 1

MSDN explicitly says that unboxing to a different type will throw an InvalidCastException.

My understanding is that the type to which a variable is unboxed is actually a parameter to the underlying CIL assembly command. It is unbox opcode that actually throws the InvalidCastException.

InvalidCastException is thrown if the object is not boxed as valType.