Question

I am building a simple twitter application. I Originally wanted to use XML but after i did a little search and found JSON is much better and faster so i decided to use it.

However after searching for hours i couldn’t find a single hello world tutorial that uses .net libraries for JSON. All the tutorials point out to using third party libraries for JSON. Since i cannot use anything out of the .net would somebody give me a few tidbits on how to get started.

Specifically using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json on .net4.0

Answer 1

Using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json

[DataContract]
[Serializable]
public class SuperObj
{
  [DataMember]
  public string Foo { get; set; }

  [DataMember]
  public string Bar { get; set; }

  [DataMember]
  public int Baz { get; set; }

  [DataMember]
  public DateTime Qux { get; set; }
}

Can be serialized to a string using

var serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(SuperObj));

using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
{
  serializer.WriteObject(stream, obj);
  var jsonString = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray());
  Console.WriteLine(jsonString);
}

That string can be deserialized back into an object

var serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(SuperObj));

using (var stream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(jsonString)))
{
  var obj2 = (SuperObj)serializer.ReadObject(stream);
  Console.WriteLine("SuperObj");
  Console.WriteLine(obj2.Foo);
  Console.WriteLine(obj2.Bar);
  Console.WriteLine(obj2.Baz);
  Console.WriteLine(obj2.Qux);
}

Like others have said though, the third party libraries tend to be better (I’ve used ServiceStack.Text and Json.Net)