'casting' with reflection

Thomas answer only works for types that implement IConvertible interface:

For the conversion to succeed, value must implement the IConvertible interface, because the method simply wraps a call to an appropriate IConvertible method. The method requires that conversion of value to conversionType be supported.

This code compile a linq expression that does the unboxing (if needed) and the conversion:

    public static object Cast(this Type Type, object data)
    {
        var DataParam = Expression.Parameter(typeof(object), "data");
        var Body = Expression.Block(Expression.Convert(Expression.Convert(DataParam, data.GetType()), Type));

        var Run = Expression.Lambda(Body, DataParam).Compile();
        var ret = Run.DynamicInvoke(data);
        return ret;
    }

The resulting lambda expression equals to (TOut)(TIn)Data where TIn is the type of the original data and TOut is the given type

void SetValue(PropertyInfo info, object instance, object value)
{
    info.SetValue(instance, Convert.ChangeType(value, info.PropertyType));
}

The answer by Thomas is right, but I thought I would add my finding that Convert.ChangeType does not handle conversion to nullable types. To handle nullable types, I used the following code:

void SetValue(PropertyInfo info, object instance, object value)
{
    var targetType = info.PropertyType.IsNullableType() 
         ? Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(info.PropertyType) 
         : info.PropertyType; 
    var convertedValue = Convert.ChangeType(value, targetType);

    info.SetValue(instance, convertedValue, null);
}

This code makes use of the following extension method:

public static class TypeExtensions
{
    public static bool IsNullableType(this Type type)
    {
        return type.IsGenericType
               && type.GetGenericTypeDefinition().Equals(typeof(Nullable<>));
    }
}