How do I turn a C# object into a JSON string in .NET?

Question

I have classes like these:

class MyDate
{
    int year, month, day;
}

class Lad
{
    string firstName;
    string lastName;
    MyDate dateOfBirth;
}

And I would like to turn a Lad object into a JSON string like this:

{
    "firstName":"Markoff",
    "lastName":"Chaney",
    "dateOfBirth":
    {
        "year":"1901",
        "month":"4",
        "day":"30"
    }
}

(Without the formatting). I found this link, but it uses a namespace that's not in .NET 4. I also heard about JSON.NET, but their site seems to be down at the moment, and I'm not keen on using external DLL files.

Are there other options besides manually creating a JSON string writer?

Answer 1

Since we all love one-liners

... this one depends on the Newtonsoft NuGet package, which is popular and better than the default serializer.

Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new {foo = "bar"})

Documentation: Serializing and Deserializing JSON