Cannot cast SqlGeography to SqlGeography

I was recently writing some C# code that manipulated location data coming out of SQL Server. Specifically, I was writing a Dapper type handler which transformed an instance of Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeography to a struct which held latitude and longitude values. The method that was causing me problems looked like this.

public override GeoCoordinate Parse(object value)
{
    var location = (SqlGeography)value;
    return new GeoCoordinate(location.Lat.Value, location.Long.Value);
}

The problem that I was having was that even though value was an instance of SqlGeography, I was consistently encountering the following exception.

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeography’ to type ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.SqlGeography’.

After a considerable amount of frustration, I figured out what the problem was. It turns out that SqlGeography instance that was being passed to the method by Dapper was coming from version 10.0.0.0 of the Microsoft.SqlServer.Types assembly, pulled straight from my machine’s GAC, whereas the SqlGeography type that I was trying to convert to was coming from version 11.0.0.0 of the assembly that I had referenced in my project via the Microsoft.SqlServer.Types NuGet package.

This issue is actually mentioned on MSDN in the article “Breaking Changes to Database Engine Features in SQL Server 2012”, about a third of the way down the page. The solution is to add the following assembly binding redirect to your application’s config file.

<dependentAssembly>
  <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.SqlServer.Types" publicKeyToken="89845dcd8080cc91" culture="neutral" />
  <bindingRedirect oldVersion="10.0.0.0" newVersion="11.0.0.0" />
</dependentAssembly>

With that in place, the CLR correctly uses version 11.0.0.0 of the assembly across the entire application, and everything works as expected.