Is there a built in way in .Net AJAX to manually serialize an object to a JSON string?

Question

I\'ve found ScriptingJsonSerializationSection but I\'m not sure how to use it. I could write a function to convert the object to a JSON string manually, but since .Net can do it

Answer 1

Well, I am currently using the following extension methods to serialize and deserialize objects:

using System.Web.Script.Serialization;

public static string ToJSON(this object objectToSerialize)
{
  JavaScriptSerializer jss = new JavaScriptSerializer();
  return jss.Serialize(objectToSerialize);
}

/// The type we are deserializing the JSON to.
public static T FromJSON(this string json)
{
  JavaScriptSerializer jss = new JavaScriptSerializer();
  return jss.Deserialize(json);
}

I use this quite a bit - be forewarned, this implementation is a bit naive (i.e. there are some potential problems with it, depending on what you are serializing and how you use it on the client, particularly with DateTimes).