Casting enums into ints

There is something that I cannot understand in C#. You can cast an out-of-range int into an enum and the compiler does not flinch. Imagine this enum:

enum Colour
{
    Red = 1,
    Green = 2,
    Blue = 3
}

Now, if you write:

Colour eco;
eco = (Colour)17;

The compiler thinks that’s fine. And the runtime, too.

Uh?

Why did the C# team decide to make this possible? This decision misses the point of using enums, I think, in scenarios like this:

void DoSomethingWithColour(Colour eco)
{
    //do something to eco.
}

In a strong-typed language like C#, I would like to assume that eco will always hold a legal Colour value. But this is not the case. A programmer could call my method with a value of 17 assigned to eco (as in previous code snippet), so the code in my method must not assume that eco holds a legal Colour value. I need to test for it explicitly and handle the exceptional values as I please. Why is this?

In my humble opinion, it would be much nicer if the compiler issued an error (or even a warning) message when casting an out-of range int into an enum, if the int value is known at compile time. If not, the runtime should throw an exception at the assignment statement.

What do you think?