Why? Purpose for getting type information?

The type of the reference is changed to the destination type.

No

The Object's Gettype method is used to get the type info. The interface does
not have a GetType method.

Armin

"Name" or "Type"?

You /should/ be able to.
The only thing to watch out for is some "bright-spark" may have
Shadow'ed the GetType method and made it do something completely
different - stupid, I know, but it's the kind of thing Developers /love/
to do - "up-casting" to Object gets around this by using Object's most
basic implementation.

If you're after a Name property on a class that you know about, just
cast the reference to the required Type (after checking that you /can/,
of course):

If TypeOf myInterfacedObject Is NamedThing Then
   sName = DirectCast( myInterfacedObject, NamedThing ).Name
End If

Nope.  If you've ever worked with 'C++' or 'C#', you'll have come across
 the likes of:

int *  pointerToInteger = 0 ;
char *  pointerToChar = (char *)pointerToInteger ;

The second line takes a pointer to an integer value and blithely stuffs
it into a variable that's supposed to point to a character value.  Both
pointers refer to the same chunk of memory, but treat it as different
"types".

DirectCast does much the same thing.  It tells the compiler to treat the
given "object reference" (a.k.a. strongly-typed Pointer) as a reference
 to a /different/ Type.  However, it does go a little bit further and
checks the object's inheritance hierarchy and, if it can't make the cast
you've asked it to, it'll throw an Exception on you:

Class Class1
   Public Property Name
Class Class2 Inherits Class1
Class Class3 Inherits Class2
Class Class4

Dim c2 as New Class2
?DirectCast( c2, Class1 ).Name ' OK
?DirectCast( c2, Class4 ).Name ' Boom!
?DirectCast( c2, Class3 ).Name ' Boom!  Think about this one

HTH,
   Phill  W.