WPF Reflection, Late Binding - wpf

Question

I am trying to set properties on WPF controls (height, width, fontweight, margin and many others) from data that is read through an XML file. I am not going to know what properties are going to be set beforehand. I was wondering if anyone knows a way to do this through reflection?
At the moment I have managed to assign all of the primitive types and enum types using reflection but I am having a little bit of trouble with properties like FontWeight, Margin, Background and many others that require other objects in setting the property for instance: To set a FontWeight property of a button you have to do it like this.
button.FontWeight = Fontweights.Bold;
or a Margin
button.Margin = new Thickness(10, 10, 10, 10);
As there are a possible 150 + properties that could be set on the controls in WPF I just wanted to avoid this sort of code.
public void setProperties(String propertyName, string PropertyValue
{
if(propertyName = "Margin")
{
Set the margin.....
}
else if (propertyName = "FontWeight")
{
set the FontWeight....
}
}
and so on for each possible property that can be set on WPF controls.

Answer 1

Behind the scenes, XAML uses TypeConverters to convert from string to the specified type. You can use them yourself, since each of the types you mentioned has a default TypeConverter specified using the TypeConverterAttribute. You can use it like this (or alternatively, make the method generic):
object Convert(Type targetType, string value)
{
var converter = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(targetType);
return converter.ConvertFromString(value);
}
Then each of the following works as expected:
Convert(typeof(Thickness), "0 5 0 0")
Convert(typeof(FontWeight), "Bold")
Convert(typeof(Brush), "Red")

Answer 2

It's actually really simple. You read your string values into properties on a ViewModel, set that view model to your DataContext, and in xaml bind up your properties. Binding uses TypeConverters automatically.

Answer 3

You can do something like this
typeof(Button).GetProperty("FontWeight").SetValue(button1,GetFontWeight("Bold"), null);
EDIT:
You can have a mapping function that convert string to property value
FontWeight GetFontWeight(string value)
{
swithc(value)
{
case "Bold" : return FontWeights.Bold; break;
...
}
}