Library Of The Week: Json.NET

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In the Christian Bible there’s a story of 10 lepers miraculously healed by Jesus. Even if you don’t believe in Christianity, imagine a leper living in the dregs of society, totally dejected until one day a man shows up and heals him and nine other fellow outcasts. Imagine how happy they should be.

They’d say thank you, right?

In the Bible story, only one of the men returns to say thank you and the other nine are so busy getting back to the lives they wished they had that they forget about the reason they were healed in the first place.

There’s evidence of this kind of lack of gratitude in the ecosystem of free libraries and projects available for .NET developers on the web. I’m a part of that club and not proud of it. I use open source .NET libraries on a regular basis and don’t say thank you. But more than just me, I look at the community participation on CodePlex projects and find it amazing how few people say a simple “thank you.”

With that in mind, I’m going to start profiling libraries that I’ve used with success to build up awareness of their existence and hopefully inspire the people who write them to do more good work since what they do is so tremendously helpful.

The first library I want to profile is the Json.NET library available from CodePlex. It contains a great, intuitive Json serialization/deserialization library. You can point to most serializable objects and convert them to a JSON format with such simple sleight of hand as:

	List<Foo> data = new List<Foo>();
	// adds to data
	string json = JsonConvert.Serialize(data);

As if that wasn’t simple, retrieving values from their serialized format is also made trivial:

	string jsonItems = GetYourJSON();
	List<Foo> data = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Foo>>(jsonItems);	

One great differentiator of Silverlight versus existing web technologies is the ability to have a virtual file system on a client computer. While HTML 5 seems to include facilities for this it is not yet built into existing browsers and even when it is, previous track records on “standards” are a precedent for how balkanized the implementation of them can be. In many areas of web development, you can push the envelope of existing technologies to get what you do out of Silverlight, but the existence of Isolated Storage is a killer feature.

Give Json.NET a try whether you’re doing Silverlight or using a different .NET related paradigm. It’s a great library.

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