How to cast object to type described by Type class?

Question

I have a object:

ExampleClass ex = new ExampleClass();

And:

Type TargetType

I would like to cast ex to ty

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do, but the impression I'm getting is that you'd like to have a single instance of some object which can "act like" many different types of objects, and you want to have getters which will allow you to view this one object in those various different ways very easily. In that case, I would suggest making a single getter method (not a property), like so:

public T Get()
{
   return (T)myObject;
}

Then you would call it like so:

Foo foo = box.Get();
Bar bar = box.Get();
// etc...

Two things to note: this is definitely not type-safe, since you can pass any type for T, including types for which the cast will fail. You can constrain it a little, like so:

public T Get() where T : SomeBaseType

Which will cause a compile error if you try to use a type which is incompatible with SomeBaseType, but I'm not sure that's totally robust. But hopefully this gets you most of the way there.

Is this what you had in mind?