This article describes a simple approach to downcasting in Visual Basic; downcasting merely refers to the process of casting an object of a base class type to a derived class type. Upcasting is legal in Visual Basic as the process there is to convert an object of a derived class type into an object of its base class type. In spite of the general illegality of downcasting you may find that when working with generics it is sometimes handy to do it anyway.