In this post, Colin Eberhardt provides a simple IValueConverter implementation that makes use of the framework type converters in order to convert between a large range of source / target types.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a single value converter that has the same flexibility as the XAML parser? It is actually very simple to create such as converter (and after creating probably my 5th ColorToBrushConverter I have no idea why it took so long before I realised this!). The .NET framework has had an API for conversion between different types via TypeConverters for a long time. They used extensively in .NET technologies for databinding and designer support, and much more.