Default value of a type at Runtime

There's really only two possibilities: null for reference types and new myType() for value types (which corresponds to 0 for int, float, etc) So you really only need to account for two cases:

object GetDefaultValue(Type t)
{
    if (t.IsValueType)
        return Activator.CreateInstance(t);

    return null;
}

(Because value types always have a default constructor, that call to Activator.CreateInstance will never fail).

You could also add it as an extension method to System.Type:

public static class TypeExtensions
{
    public static object GetDefaultValue(this Type t)
    {
        if (t.IsValueType && Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(t) == null)
            return Activator.CreateInstance(t);
        else
            return null;
    }
}