title: Converting Byte to SByte
body: <p>I'm reading bytes from a serial port, but I need to convert them to signed, 8-bit integers (SByte). Unfortunately, the overflow checking in Visual Basic prevents a Byte value of 255 from becoming -1 in an SByte. So, essentially, I want to do the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>uint8_t a = 255;
  int8_t b = (int8_t)a;    // b == -1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I do this in Visual Basic?</p>