DirectCast vs CType

• Both keywords take an expression to be converted as the first argument, and the type to convert it to as the second argument.
• Both conversions fail if there is no conversion defined between the data type of the expression and the data type specified as the second argument.
• The difference between the two keywords is that CType succeeds as long as there is a valid conversion defined between the expression and the type, whereas DirectCast requires the run-time type of an object variable to be the same as the specified type.
• If the specified type and the run-time type of the expression are the same, however, the run-time performance of DirectCast is better than that of CType.