Reflection, Casting List to IEnumerable<object>

Question

I have a class that i need to reflect through an object properties and check values and other things. Everything seems to be working exception when i have a list and try to

Answer 1

The fact that int is a value type makes the difference here. According to C# spec there must be a reference or identity conversion between generic types to make types variant-convertible:

A type T<A1, …, An> is variance-convertible to a type T<B1, …, Bn> if T is either an interface or a delegate type declared with the variant type parameters T<X1, …, Xn>, and for each variant type parameter Xi one of the following holds:

• Xi is covariant and an implicit reference or identity conversion exists from Ai to Bi
• Xi is contravariant and an implicit reference or identity conversion exists from Bi to Ai
• Xi is invariant and an identity conversion exists from Ai to Bi

IEnumerable<T> is covariant, so the line I marked is important. Ai in your case is int and Bi is int. There is no reference conversion from int to object, because int is not a reference type. There is also no identity conversion between these two, because they are not the same.

I don't know the entire context of your question, but you can use non-generic IEnumerable instead of IEnumerable<object>. They are pretty much the same. However, you might be facing an XY problem here, so it's hard to help you without knowing more about your case.