JSON Serialization in .NET

Many of you may be familiar with the use of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). It is a very tight syntax for expressing the state of an object and is very widely used in Web 2.0/AJAX style development in which objects are passed back and forth between the client using the XmlHttpRequest object out of band to eliminate the need to do a full page refresh.

I found a great article by Rick Strahl that outlines the pros/cons of two built-in .NET serializers: JavaScriptSerializer and DataContractJsonSerializer. You can read about them here.

After using both methods in my own application, I found that another con of the JavaScriptSerializer that is a pro for the DataContractJsonSerializer class is that it requires a public default, parameter-less constructor. This means that I cannot serialize objects that I also would like to make read-only, and therefore, requires a constructor with the properties defined up front.

One point I wanted to make in this post was that the extension class that Rick defines in his post for simplifying DataContractJsonSerializer usage does not work properly. In order to correct it, I added the 'this' keyword to the first parameter so that .NET recognized the static methods as extensions to the object type. In addition, I converted the FromJsonString() method to a generic FromJsonString<T>() method to allow the return object to be strongly typed.

Code is listed below, if you are interested.

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Changing the Default Browser in Visual Studio 2008 with ASP.NET MVC

How frustrating!  I spent at least 15 minutes trying to figure out how to change the default browser for debugging to my preferred browser in Visual Studio 2008. 

Apparently, with a normal ASP.NET application, you can just right-click on any .aspx file and select 'Browse With...' from the context menu.  The dialog that opens (shown below) has the option to select a browser and click 'Set as Default' button.

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Unfortunately, the .aspx files in ASP.NET MVC applications don't don't provide this option in the context menu.  The only one that works is the Default.aspx file. 

I found the answer from this helpful blog post.  Thank you, Steve Bodnar! 

My recommendation to Microsoft is to either put this setting in the Tools/Options menu, which seems to be the most natural place to look for this setting, or place it in the Properties of the Web Site/Application project - which might be even better if you want to specify this setting per project.