Decoding T-SQL CAST in C#/VB.NET

Try removing the 0x first and then call Encoding.UTF8.GetString. I think that may work.

Essentially: 0x44004500

Remove the 0x, and then always two bytes are one character:

44 00 = D

45 00 = E

6F 00 = o

72 00 = r

So it's definitely a Unicode/UTF format with two bytes/character.

I went back to Michael's post, did some more poking and realized that I did need to do a double conversion, and eventually worked out this little nugget:

Convert.ToString(Convert.ToChar(Int32.Parse(EncodedString.Substring(intParseIndex, 2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber)));

From there I simply made a loop to go through all the characters 2 by 2 and get them "hexified" and then translated to a string.

To Nick, and anybody else interested, I went ahead and posted my little application over in CodePlex. Feel free to use/modify as you need.