The cast to value type 'Int32' failed because the materialized value is null

A linq-to-sql query isn't executed as code, but rather translated into SQL. Sometimes this is a "leaky abstraction" that yields unexpected behaviour.

One such case is null handling, where there can be unexpected nulls in different places. ...DefaultIfEmpty(0).Sum(0) can help in this (quite simple) case, where there might be no elements and sql's SUM returns null whereas c# expect 0.

A more general approach is to use ?? which will be translated to COALESCE whenever there is a risk that the generated SQL returns an unexpected null:

var creditsSum = (from u in context.User
              join ch in context.CreditHistory on u.ID equals ch.UserID                                        
              where u.ID == userID
              select (int?)ch.Amount).Sum() ?? 0;

This first casts to int? to tell the C# compiler that this expression can indeed return null, even though Sum() returns an int. Then we use the normal ?? operator to handle the null case.

Based on this answer, I wrote a blog post with details for both LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities.

To allow a nullable Amount field, just use the null coalescing operator to convert nulls to 0.

var creditsSum = (from u in context.User
              join ch in context.CreditHistory on u.ID equals ch.UserID                                        
              where u.ID == userID
              select ch.Amount ?? 0).Sum();