>I have been using the casting (like in your 2nd example), I don't have any hard proof but I think it is more efficient.
>I was not aware of the reader.GetGuid, so that was an eye opener to me too. I'll have to check into that. Thanks for posting the code.

I read an article about casting vs. converting and the author said converting is more forgiving if you're converting bit types to integers. I don't do that and didn't need the extra flexibility, so I would have used casting had I not found the DataReader methods.