Automatic returning of value of a property of a type

In my new job, they have a paradigm where they have thousands of properties of objects that are a type of, say, Long. But this is called a LongField. And to get the actual value of that field, I have to use property.AsLong. I'd love to just type property and not have to add the .AsLong or .AsInteger or .AsBoolean, etc.

Is there any way that I can edit the base class(es) to allow me to just use property and not property.AsWhatever?

EDIT: for example code, here is what I mean.

Dim asdf as Long = myThing.thingsID

That shows an error: "Value of type 'LongField' cannot be converted to 'Long'"

I'd prefer to not have to remember if I'm dealing with a Long or a LongField, and then have to add .AsLong to everything. Same with ints, bools, dates, etc.

If you have a type like this:

Public Class LongField

    Private value As Long

    Public Sub New(value As Long)
        Me.value = value
    End Sub

    Public Function ToLong() As Long
        Return value
    End Function

End Class

then the last two lines of the following code are not allowed, even with Option Strict Off:

Dim l As Long = 123
Dim lf As New LongField(456)

l = lf
lf = l

If you add the following code to that type though:

Public Shared Widening Operator CType(source As LongField) As Long
    Return source.value
End Operator

Public Shared Widening Operator CType(source As Long) As LongField
    Return New LongField(source)
End Operator

both those lines become legal and will perform implicit conversions, even with Option Strict On.

This would allow any existing code to continue to work as is and for that ToLong method to continue to be used in new code, while also allowing a LongField object to be treated as though it were a Long, for the purposes of getting and setting at least. It is still a class though, so is subject to reference type semantics rather than value type semantics. It's hard to say whether this would defeat the original purpose of such a type because it's hard to know what that purpose would have been exactly.

It's worth noting that this:

someObject.SomeLongFieldProperty = someLong

would result in that property referring to a new object of type LongField. It may be that, the way things are currently implemented, you're actually supposed to change the Long value within the same LongField object. We can't tell from what you've provided. That said, if that was supposed to be the case then it couldn't have been guaranteed unless the property was ReadOnly anyway.