JSON-deserialization in .NET

If you're working with ASP.NET MVC (an excellent framework), passing JSON-data from your views to your Controllers is a magic experience - the JSON-objects are
automatically serialized to their .NET representations, as long as you have the
same field/property names. 

However, if you want to parse data outside of the magical web world - say you'd like to parse JSON-data from your Windows Phone application - you're out of luck. Unless ... 


To parse JSON-data, I initially tried the DataContractJsonSerializer, since I prefer using the plain/native Microsoft .NET framework whenever possible. I quickly ran into issues though, finding that it simply did not work for my purposes. After som web scurrying, I found Newtonsoft's Json-parser and fell in love:


Data Contract:

    [DataContract]
    public class LinkItem
    {
        [DataMember]
        public string Headline { get; set; }


        [DataMember]
        public string Abstract { get; set; }


        [DataMember]
        public string Url { get; set; }
    }


JSON-data:
            var jsonData = @"[ 
{ Headline: 'Spree', Abstract: 'Häftiga Spree', Url: 'http://www.spree.se/', Lars: false },
{ Headline: 'Synaptic', Abstract: 'Trygga Synaptic', Url: 'http://www.synaptic.se/', Lars: true },
{ Headline: '.NETAkademien', Abstract: 'Ett nätverk av .NET-specialister', Url: 'http://www.netakademien.se/', Lars: false }
]";

Parsing:
IEnumerable<LinkItem> items = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<IEnumerable<LinkItem>>(jsonData);

The parsing works even though I've defined data in JSON (the Lars property)
that I am not interested in.

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