Saving data as varbinary to work around sql_variant

Question

I've been busy with a project which has a requirement to store different kinds of settings in a table. My first thought was to use sql_variant, but since the project heavily relies on Entity Framework this was not an option (it still has no support).

I figured I could also simply store the data as binary and, given the type, decode it as desired. My table would look something like this;

+------------+-------------+------------+------
|    Data    |    Type     |   Name     | ...
+------------+-------------+------------+------
|  varbinary |  nvarchar   |  nvarchar  | ...
+------------+-------------+------------+------

And a simple code implementation would then be (using C# here);

public object GetDecodedObject(string settingName)
{
    Settings settings = db.Settings.Where(s => s.Name == settingName).FirstOrDefault();
    switch(settings.Type)
    {
        case "pdf":
             return DecodeAsPdf(settings.Data);
             break;
        case "int32":
             return DecodeAsInt32(settings.Data);
             break;
        ...
        default:
             return null; 
             break;
    }
}

Of course, this code is just here as an example.

My question is;

Would this be a viable option, or are there other (and better) ways to do so?

There is not much to find on the internet about this. I have looked into SqlVariant, but the problem with that solution is that it's read-only. I have to write too.

Added the tag "entity-framework" because maybe someone from there has a better solution for a workaround for sql_variant.