Passing property Accesor as Function`

Warning:  This is a purely academic and speculative post.



This has suddenly become a real 'would like to have' feature in the project
I'm currently working on.  I know this isn't possible in standard C#, but
I'm trying to find a hammer with the right weight and shape to beat this
into some semblance of working.  What I would like to achieve is something
like this, in the commented line:



    public class PersonForm

    {

        System.Windows.Forms.TextBox textRate = new TextBox();

        public void BuildPerson(Person person)

        {

            Person pers = new Person();

            pers.HourlyRate = textRate.Text.Length == 0 ? (double?) null :
double.Parse(textRate.Text);

            // SetPropertyFromText(pers.HourlyRate, textRate.Text)

        }

    }



My SetPropertyFromText should take the pers.HourlyRate as a delegate
parameter, not as a double?, determine the correct type conversion based on
the type of the pers.HourlyRate, and set the property to the converted
object value.



I can easily use a property name as my property parameter for
SetPropertyFromText, but then I lose compile time checks.  Our generated
DAL, nettiers, provides, for each entity, an Enum with all the column
properties for each entity, and I think this is about as close as I've seen
to what I want, but not quite there.



Any ideas on the matter?




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