James Newton-King
Jun 6 2013

Json.NET 5.0 Release 6 – Glimpse Plugin

The big new feature in this release is a Json.NET plugin for Glimpse. For anyone not familiar with Glimpse it is an open source diagnostics tool for ASP.NET, bringing the server-side information of a webpage into the browser. It is very useful and takes just a couple of minutes to get running.

The Glimpse Json.NET plugin adds a JSON tab to the Glimpse UI with information about each time Json.NET is used on the server, including:

  • Serialized type
  • Time taken
  • Any errors (with stack trace)
  • The complete JSON document

Being able to see the complete JSON document that Json.NET serialized or deserialized will be particularly useful when debugging unexpected results.

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The plugin also adds Json.NET events to the Glimpse timeline tab. The timeline tab is lets you see when and where Json.NET is used in a request. In the example below JSON is deserialized in the ASP.NET MVC controller action and then re-serialized in the Razor view.

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Today all calls to SerializeObject/DeserializeObject will automatically show up in Glimpse and going forward the frameworks that use Json.NET should also start appearing. Making all JSON actions on the server (deserializing the JSON request, serializing the JSON response, calls to JSON services like Web API/Facebook/Twitter, etc) visible in the browser for debugging without digging into tools like Fiddler will be very useful.

Download the Json.NET Glimpse plugin off NuGet now:

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Changes

Here is a complete list of what has changed since Json.NET 5.0 Release 5.

  • New feature - Added serialized/deserialized JSON to verbose tracing
  • New feature - Added support for using type name handling with ISerializable content
  • Fix - Fixed not using default serializer settings with primitive values and JToken.ToObject
  • Fix - Fixed error writing BigIntegers with JsonWriter.WriteToken
  • Fix - Fixed serializing and deserializing flag enums with EnumMember attribute
  • Fix - Fixed error deserializing interfaces with a valid type converter
  • Fix - Fixed error deserializing ISerializable objects that also implement IConvertible
  • Fix - Fixed potential infinite loop when parsing unquoted JSON values

Links

Json.NET CodePlex Project

Json.NET 5.0 Release 6 Download – Json.NET source code and assemblies