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Mastering C# for .NET Developers

Working with JSON

Explore how to efficiently serialize C# objects into JSON strings and deserialize JSON back to objects using System.Text.Json. Understand reading from and writing to JSON files asynchronously while ensuring proper resource management.

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JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the industry standard format for data exchange, configuration files, and web APIs. It is a lightweight, text-based format that is easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate.

Modern .NET provides the System.Text.Json namespace. This built-in library delivers high-performance JSON manipulation without relying on third-party packages. The two primary operations we perform with JSON are serialization and deserialization.

Serialization (C# object to JSON)

Serialization is the process of converting a .NET object (like a class or struct) into a JSON string. We use the JsonSerializer.Serialize method to convert a C# object into a JSON string.

C# 14.0
using System.Text.Json;
var course = new Course { Title = ".NET Fundamentals", Author = "John Doe", DurationInHours = 5 };
string jsonString = JsonSerializer.Serialize(course);
Console.WriteLine(jsonString);
public class Course
{
    public string Title { get; set; } = string.Empty;
    public string Author { get; set; } = string.Empty;
    public int DurationInHours { get; set; }
}

  • Line 1: We import the System.Text.Json namespace to access the serialization ...