Using Color issue ??

I have a third party function that requires a color as an integer, this works &HFF0000

 My color data (from SQL server 2005 varchar field)  is in string format and it looks like this #FF0000, and it fails when I use the # format in the function.

 How do I convert a #FF0000 to a &H or whatever, it has to be an integer ???

 CINT does not work ??

 System.drawing.colortranslarfor does seam to work as it does not return an integer ...
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