Can you Instantiate an Object Instance from JSON in .NET?

Question

Since Object Initializers are very similar to JSON, and now there are Anonymous Types in .NET. It would be cool to be able to take a string, such as JSON, and create an Anon

Answer 1

There are languages for .NET that have duck-typing but it's not possible with C# using Dot.Notation since C# requires that all member references are resolved at compile time. If you want to use the Dot.Notation, you still have to define a class somewhere with the required properties, and use whatever method you want to instantiate the class from the JSON data. Pre-defining a class does have benefits like strong typing, IDE support including intellisense, and not worrying about spelling mistakes. You can still use anonymous types:

 T deserialize(string jsonStr, T obj) { /* ... */}

 var jsonString = "{FirstName='Chris', LastName='Johnson, Other='unused'}";
 var person     = deserialize(jsonString, new {FirstName="",LastName=""});
 var x          = person.FirstName; //strongly-typed