How to cast/convert all the attribute values of an entity to String, without having to check attr type ?

Hi, i have a big  issue with Entities attribute values fetching..all the attributes have their own type which are almost all a pain in the ass to cast as String (and i don't talk about Entity References, which will make me perform extra queries just for them..which is totally insane, and a so old fashioned ) But i'm wondering: is there a way so i can avoid all this pain of checking the type of each attribute and perform the proper casting/conversion on it, like some wizard trick that would magically convert my entity attributes list to a Dictionary<string, string> ??? Honestly, i think that this API is 100% pure crap..please prove me wrong and show me that it is a little less crappy than i thought !