Enums casting to a byte

Question

Am using EntityFramework and have a LinkStatusID column which is a tinyint, which gets generated into a byte in C#.

public enum LinkStatus
{
    Added = 0,
    Deleted = 1
}

however this gives:

a.LinkStatusID = (byte)Enums.LinkStatus.Deleted;

is there a more elegant way to structure this?

EDIT2 for LastCoder:

public enum LinkStatus : byte
{
    Added = 0,
    Deleted = 1
}

    var blah = Enums.LinkStatus.Added;
    var ty = blah.GetType();

    var blah2 = (byte)Enums.LinkStatus.Added;
    var ty2 = blah2.GetType();

This doesn't work (as I expected) however the first answer here explains why.

EDIT3: EF isn't the only way this sln gets to the DB, so I'm keen to keep the Enums explicit in the code. Thanks for EF5 Enum suggestions!

Answer 1

public enum LinkStatus : byte

Will avoid the explicit cast.