Is it possible to override the type descriptor for an existing .net type?

Or more specifically

1) Can I assign a type descriptor to a property

2) If so, what's the best way of getting the type converter at runtime.

Basically I have configuration objects that are populated using reflection. So far this works just for simple types (string, int, datetime) but I wanted to support converting comma separated lists to List.

So far I've achieved this by deriving a custom type "ConvertableList<T>" from List<T> and decorating that with my custom type 开发者_StackOverflow中文版converter.

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You can associate TypeConverter s to existing types like:

    TypeDescriptor.AddAttributes(typeof(List<int>),
        new TypeConverterAttribute(typeof(MyTypeConverter)));

(somewhere during startup)

Then to get the converter, the standard code should work:

    TypeConverter conv = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(typeof(List<int>));

or:

    object obj = new List<int>();
    ...
    TypeConverter conv = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(obj);