Use CASE statement to check if column exists in table - SQL Server

Question

I'm using a SQL server statement embedded in some other C# code; and simply want to check if a column exists in my table.

If the column (ModifiedByUSer here) does exist then I want to return a 1 or a true; if it doesn't then I want to return a 0 or a false (or something similar that can be interpreted in C#).

I've got as far as using a CASE statement like the following:

SELECT cast(case WHEN EXISTS (select ModifiedByUser from Tags)              THEN 0              ELSE 1              END as bit) 

But if the ModifiedByUser doesn't exist then I'm getting an invalid column name, instead of the return value.

I've also considered:

IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'Tags' AND COLUMN_NAME = 'ModifiedByUser')   BEGIN // Do something here to return a value   END 

But don't know how to conditionally return a value/bool/bit based on the result. Any help much appreciated!

Answer 1

Final answer was a combination of two of the above (I've upvoted both to show my appreciation!):

select case     when exists (       SELECT 1        FROM Sys.columns c        WHERE c.[object_id] = OBJECT_ID('dbo.Tags')           AND c.name = 'ModifiedByUserId'    )     then 1     else 0  end