Casting vs Converting an object toString, when object really is a string

The two are intended for different purposes. The ToString method of any object is supposed to return a string representation of that object. Casting is quite different, and the 'as' key word performs a conditional cast, as has been said. The 'as' key word basically says "get me a reference of this type to that object if that object is this type" while ToString says "get me a string representation of that object". The result may be the same in some cases but the two should never be considered interchangeable because, as I said, they exist for different purposes. If your intention is to cast then you should always use a cast, NOT ToString.

from http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=443873

see also http://bytes.com/groups/net-c/225365-tostring-string-cast

If you know it is a String then by all means cast it to a String. Casting your object is going to be faster than calling a virtual method.

Edit: Here are the results of some benchmarking:

============ Casting vs. virtual method ============
cast 29.884 1.00
tos  33.734 1.13

I used Jon Skeet's BenchmarkHelper like this:

using System;
using BenchmarkHelper;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Object input = "Foo";
        String output = "Foo";

        var results 
           = TestSuite.Create("Casting vs. virtual method", input, output)
            .Add(cast)
            .Add(tos)
            .RunTests()
            .ScaleByBest(ScalingMode.VaryDuration);

        results.Display(ResultColumns.NameAndDuration | ResultColumns.Score,
                results.FindBest());
    }

    static String cast(Object o)
    {
        return (String)o;
    }

    static String tos(Object o)
    {
        return o.ToString();
    }
}

So it appears that casting is in fact slightly faster than calling ToString().