Why does casting a null to a primitive(ie: int) in .net 2.0 throw a null ref exception and not a invalid cast exception?

Question

I was going through some code and came across a scenario where my combobox has not been initialized yet. This is in .NET 2.0 and in the following code, this.cbRegion.Select

Answer 1

It's attempting to read the object before it casts it. Hence you're getting the null exception instead of a cast exception.