title: DBNull to String in ASP.NET inline expressions has casting error
body: <p>Hey guys, a table in my database has a field "Description" that Allow's Nulls'. This causes a problem when rendering the page in ASP.NET since I want to make sure I'm decoding the string as its coming out of the database as I'm encoding it on the way in. Naturally there are some NULL's in the Description field, which I would like to keep.</p>
  
  <p>So my ASP.NET page has this code</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;asp:TextBox ID="DescInfo" Text='&lt;%# HttpUtility.HtmlDecode((string)Eval("Description")) %&gt;' /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So when I render the page, I will get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Unable to cast object of type 'System.DBNull' to type 'System.String'.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The way I look at it, I have two options:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>bind during load</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>OR</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>make the table a non NULL table and use empty values instead</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Anyone have a better idea perhaps?</p>