title: What is object casting?
body: <p>I'm a bit confused about what exactly object casting is and what it's used for.
  I've read the MSDN documentation about <a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173105.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer" title="Casting and type conversion">Casting and type conversion</a>, where I can see that for explicit conversion you need to use a cast operator. I understand the example given in the documentation, that you need to use a cast operator if you might lose some data when converting one type to another. </p>
  
  <p>I'm just confused about how you cast objects? I'm assuming objects are instances of a class that might hold more information than just a simple data type? So how, why and when would you need to cast an object?</p>
  
  <p>I've seen an example of casting an object, which is simply:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SomeType name = (SomeType)obj;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Am I missing something, or is this object casting? If it is, in what scenarios would you need to cast an object like this?</p>