Feddas - Shawn Featherly

I've been writing a custom control that takes a Fraction in the XAML supplied as a Point, (X,Y). I don't want it to freak when the Y isn't supplied, since, in my case this just means Y is equal to 1.
I came across this thread while trying to make this control more user friendly.
http://bytes.com/topic/c-sharp/answers/258911-overloading-properties

The last option of making the Property of type Object is what did the trick for me. Below is how I overloaded my property to accept both double and Point.

private Point ratioToFirst;
public Object RatioToFirst
{
    get { return this.ratioToFirst; }
    set
    {
        if (value is Point)
            this.ratioToFirst = (Point)value;
        else if (value is double || value is int)
            this.ratioToFirst = new Point((double)value, 1);
        else //values from XAML will usually be taken in as strings
        {
            string input = value.ToString();
            try
            {
                if (input.Contains(",") || input.Contains("/") || input.Contains(":")) value = ConvertToPoint(input);
                else value = Convert.ToDouble(value);
                if (value is Point && this.ratioToFirst != (Point)value)//check if the value changed
                    this.ratioToFirst = (Point)value;
                else if (value is double)
                    this.ratioToFirst = new Point((double)value, 1);
            }
            catch  //unsupported or malformed string
            {
                this.ratioToFirst = new Point(-1, 1);
            }
        }
    }
}
private Point ConvertToPoint(string input)
{
    char delimiter = ',';   //find what is used to delimit the two numbers of the Point
    if (input.Contains("/")) delimiter = '/';
    else if (input.Contains(":")) delimiter = ':';

    string x = input.Split(delimiter)[0],
        y = input.Split(delimiter)[1];
    return new Point(Convert.ToDouble(x), Convert.ToDouble(y));
}

This property can be utilized with the following XAML

Labels: C#, Custom Control, Overloading Properties, Silverlight