Considering the nature of your assignment or exercise, I think it would be a good idea to also read How do I ask and answer homework questions? as well as Open letter to students with homework problems — Some programmer dude 11 secs ago

It changes the question, certainly. Passing in an object to a parameter expecting a byte array would throw an exception, and not the one you posted. Programming requires attention to details -- good programmers pay attention to those details. In any case, it sounds like an issue with the connection between the web server and the SQL Server. Perhaps high latency or you should try using a named pipes provider instead of TCP. — Heretic Monkey 28 secs ago