ServiceStack is a light-weight, complete and independent open source web framework for .NET. I recently started playing with it and I must say that it is an awesome framework. It has several nice features including .NET’s fastest JSON serializer.

Each piece in ServiceStack can be used independently. So is its piece for serialization. The serialization package of ServiceStack can be installed via NuGet using the following command:

The above package can be installed on any type of application. Let’s use the following Person class for creating object to serialize/de-serialize:

public class Person
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string Occupation { get; set; }
}

Following is a sample object of the person class:

var person = new Person()
{
    Id = 1,
    Name = "Ravi",
    City = "Hyderabad",
    Occupation = "Software Engineer"
};

To serialize this object to a JSON string, we need to use the ServiceStack.Text.JsonSerializer class. Following statement serializes the above object:

var serialized = JsonSerializer.SerializeToString(person);

The above string can be de-serialized using the following statement:

var converted = JsonSerializer.DeserializeFromString<Person>(serialized);

The JsonSerializer class also has APIs to serialize into or de-serialize from TextWriter or Stream.

The APIs in ServiceStack are light-weight and easy to use. I am working on a series of articles on this great framework. Stay tuned for updates.

Happy coding!