I have inherited an AddIn project written in VB.NET and only works on C
++ projects.

Every time an item is selected within the IDE the following event is
captured

Public Shared WithEvents itemSelectionChanged As
EnvDTE.SelectionEvents

Within here they get the active project to them determine if its a
VCProject.

Given an object of Project, what is the best way to convert to
VCProject?

I have used the following code which seems to work but dont fully
understand the semantics of it, i mean why i need to put the call to
Object in  where project is an instance of Project?

vc_project = CType(project.Object, VCProject)

When i try to do the same for VCConfiguration it throws an exception

Dim confg As EnvDTE.Configuration =
project.ConfigurationManager.ActiveConfiguration
Dim cfg As VCConfiguration = CType(confg.Object, VCConfiguration)

Does not work, throws exception ???
Have to use this instead

Dim cfg As VCConfiguration =
CType(prj.Configurations.Item(confg.ConfigurationName),
VCConfiguration)

But when I issue

Dim related As Boolean = confg.GetType().IsInstanceOfType(cfg)
MsgBox(CStr(related))

Get back true!

Can someone please clear up this issue for me?
How do you get the corresponding VC specific objects from the DTE2
general objects?