A .NET Native Alternative to JSON.NET (a.k.a. Newtonsoft.Json) for Dynamics 365 Plugins

23 January 2020, Birmingham, UK

Background

JSON.NET (a.k.a Newtonsoft.Json) is a powerful JSON library. But when working with Dynamics 365 plug-ins, it needs to be combined into your plug-in DLL using ILMerge. This works fine, but using ILMerge for plug-in and custom workflow assemblies is unsupported and can jeopardise your support agreement.

If you don’t want to use ILMerge, or unable to for some reason, you can use DataContractJsonSerializer for most JSON tasks JSON.NET is capable of.

Show me the code

Here is an example drop-in replacement class with the same interface as JSON.NET:

using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;
using System.Text;

public static class JsonConvert
{
    public static string Serialize<T>(T obj)
    {
        using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
        {
            GetSerializer<T>().WriteObject(stream, obj);
            return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray());
        }
    }

    public static T Deserialize<T>(string json)
    {
        using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
        {
            using (var writer = new StreamWriter(stream))
            {
                writer.Write(json);
                writer.Flush();
                stream.Position = 0;
                return (T)GetSerializer<T>().ReadObject(stream);
            }
        }
    }

    private static DataContractJsonSerializer GetSerializer<T>()
    {
        var settings = new DataContractJsonSerializerSettings
        {
            UseSimpleDictionaryFormat = true
        };

        return new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(T), settings);
    }
}

This can be used in the same way as JSON.NET:

// Serialize a Person object into a JSON string
string json = JsonConvert.Serialize(person);

// Deserialize a string into a Person object.
var person = JsonConvert.Deserialize<Person>(json);


using System.Runtime.Serialization;

[DataContract]
public class Person
{
    [DataMember]
    public string FullName { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public Dictionary<string, string> Attributes { get; set; }
}

Hope this saves someone a minute or two!