Implicit Conversion over a Collection

Question

I ran into a problem this week regarding implicit conversions in C# on collections. While this (using implicit) may not be our final approach, I wanted to at least finish out the code to offer the team as an option. I boiled down the problem to the following sample case:

I have two classes in my example: one that represents a business object (Foo) and one that represents the client version (View Object) of this business item (FooVO), as defined below...

public class Foo
{
    public string Id {get; set;}

    public string BusinessInfo {get; set;}
}

public class FooVO
{
    public string Id {get; set;}

    public static implicit operator FooVO( Foo foo )
    {
        return new FooVO { Id = foo.Id };
    }
}

My problem is when I have a a List of Foo objects and want to convert them to a list of FooVO objects using my implicit operator.

List<Foo> foos = GetListOfBusinessFoos(); // Get business objects to convert

I tried

List<FooVO> fooVOs = foos; // ERROR

and

List<FooVO> fooVOs = (List<FooVO>) foos; // ERROR

and even

List<FooVO> fooVOs = foos.Select( x => x ); // ERROR

I know I can do this in a loop, but I was hoping for straightforward (LINQ?) way to convert the objects in one shot. Any ideas?

Thank you in advance.

Edit Fixed typo in example

Answer 1

List<FooVO> d = new List<FooVO>(foos.Select(x => (FooVO)x)); 

Works for me.

Answer 2

The reason your examples don't work is because you are trying to assign an IEnumerable<FooVO> to a List<FooVO>. The following should work.

 List<FooVO> fooVos = foos.Select<Foo,FooVO>(x => x).ToList();