Assigning a binary constant

Question

Is there a way to assign a binary value to a VB variable? All of the obvious choices don't work. I've tried prefixing with &B, appending with b but nothing seems to work. I'm not having much luck searching for it either. I don't need this for my application, but I'm rather, just curious so alternate solutions are not necessary.

[Edit] For clarification, what I was looking for (which does not appear to be possible) was how to assign a literal binary number to a variable, in a similar manner in which you can assign a hex or octal number. I was just looking for a more visually engaging way to assign values to a flag enum.

Code:

Dim num as Integer = &H100ABC       'Hex'
Dim num2 as Integer = &O123765      'Octal'

Dim myFantasy as Integer = &B1000   'What I would like to be able to do'
Dim myReality as Integer = 2 ^ 3    'What I ended up doing'

Answer 1

I might stab myself after this one:

Convert.ToInt32("1100101", 2);

On a more serious note (noticing that you have updated the question), for flag enums what you may want is the left shift operator (<<):

Dim myReality as Integer          = 1 << 0   // 1
Dim myAlternateReality as Integer = 1 << 1   // 2
Dim myParallelUniverse as Integer = 1 << 2   // 4
...

and so on up to 31.