I've been having quite a few problems trying to use Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeography. I know full well that support for this in Ling to Sql is not great. I've tried numerous ways, beginning with what would the expected way (Database type of geography, CLR type of SqlGeography). This produces the NotSupportedException, which is widely discussed via blogs.

I've then gone down the path of treating the geography column as a varbinary(max), as geography is a UDT stored as binary. This seems to work fine (with some binary reading and writing extension methods).

However, I'm now running into a rather obscure issue, which does not seem to have happened to many other people.

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type 'Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeography' to type 'System.Byte[]'.

This error is thrown from an ObjectMaterializer when iterating through a query. It seems to only occur when the tables containing geography columns are included in a query implicitly (ie. using the EntityRef<> properties to do joins).

System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.ObjectReaderCompiler.ObjectReader`2.MoveNext()

My question: If I'm retrieving the geography column as varbinary(max), I might expect the reverse error: can't cast byte[] to SqlGeography. That I would understand. This I don't. I do have some properies on the partial LINQ to SQL classes that hide the binary conversion... could those be the issue?

Any help appreciated, and I know there's probably not enough information.