Why are .NET property wrappers bypassed at runtime when setting dependency properties in XAML?

Solution 1:

The explanation is given in XAML Loading and Dependency Properties:

The current WPF implementation of its XAML processor is inherently dependency property aware. The WPF XAML processor uses property system methods for dependency properties when loading binary XAML and processing attributes that are dependency properties. This effectively bypasses the property wrappers. When you implement custom dependency properties, you must account for this behavior and should avoid placing any other code in your property wrapper other than the property system methods GetValue and SetValue.

and:

For implementation reasons, it is computationally less expensive to identify a property as a dependency property and access the property system SetValue method to set it, rather than using the property wrapper and its setter. This is because a XAML processor must infer the entire object model of the backing code based only on knowing the type and member relationships that are indicated by the structure of the markup and various strings.