System.Windows.PropertyPath - can this class help me with reflection on deep-nested properties (types)?

Question

I've been sitting lately on the topic of Reflection, mainly with the purpose of instantiating a New class and setting properties on fields.. By path... Where, for example I might have a class called Games, with public property -

Game myGame = new Game()

myGame.GamingProperties.HowToPlay = "bla bla bla";
myGame.StateProperties.CreationTime = DateTime.Today;

So for example I have to set value (with reflection magic) on property with a path of: "GamingProperties.HowToPlay"

Until now I've been using the "PropertyReflector" class by Guy Mahieu - which does exactly what I need, but slowly when it comes to reflecting/de-serializing 100,000-s of objects.

Bit later I found out that it is possible to set property values much much faster by using "Expression Trees" (and a project like "FastReflection") was a good example.. But I got stuck now with the FastReflection because I can't set values properly on nested types...

Anyhow – the question is – whether System.Windows.PropertyPath could help me somehow with all this? Is it even related? Maybe I could use it for my needs, or use the .Binding methods (that are closely related with System.Windows.PropertyPath)?

I hope that I was clear and not too messy with my question and I will be grateful for any hints, suggestions...

Answer 1

The short answer is no. The PropertyPath is used by the WPF binding system to tie DependencyProperties to other properties (either dependency or regular). When binding to a dependency property, the binding system can use the property path to resolve the bound property using WPF metadata. When binding to a CLR property, it has to use .NET reflection to resolve the property.

In either case, it's not generally used to set CLR properties, but it can with two-way bindings.

It won't provide a speed boost for that many objects and I doubt it is a solution to your problem.