A way of casting a base type to a derived type

Solution 1:

Not soundly, in "managed" languages. This is downcasting, and there is no sane down way to handle it, for exactly the reason you described (subclasses provide more than base classes - where does this "more" come from?). If you really want a similar behaviour for a particular hierarchy, you could use constructors for derived types that will take the base type as a prototype.

One could build something with reflection that handled the simple cases (more specific types that have no addition state). In general, just redesign to avoid the problem.

Edit: Woops, can't write conversion operators between base/derived types. An oddity of Microsoft trying to "protect you" against yourself. Ah well, at least they're no where near as bad as Sun.

Solution 2:

Try composition instead of inheritance!

It seems to me like you'd be better off passing an instance of SomeBaseClass to the SomeDerivedClass (which will no longer derive base class, and should be renamed as such)

public class BooleanHolder{       
    public bool BooleanEvaluator {get;set;}
}

public class DatabaseInserter{
    BooleanHolder holder;

    public DatabaseInserter(BooleanHolder holder){
        this.holder = holder;
    }

    public void Insert(SqlConnection connection) {
          ...random connection stuff
          cmd.Parameters["IsItTrue"].Value = holder.BooleanEvalutar;
          ...
    }
}

public static void Main(object[] args) {
    BooleanHolder h = new BooleanHolder();
    DatabaseInserter derClass = new DatabaseInserter(h);
    derClass.Insert(new sqlConnection);
}

Check out http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-1998/jw-11-techniques.html (page 3):

Code reuse via composition Composition provides an alternative way for Apple to reuse Fruit's implementation of peel(). Instead of extending Fruit, Apple can hold a reference to a Fruit instance and define its own peel() method that simply invokes peel() on the Fruit.