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JSON serialization and deserialization (marshalling and unmarshalling) in .NET - overview

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The System.Text.Json namespace provides functionality for serializing to and deserializing from JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Serialization is the process of converting the state of an object, that is, the values of its properties, into a form that can be stored or transmitted. The serialized form doesn't include any information about an object's associated methods. Deserialization reconstructs an object from the serialized form.

The System.Text.Json library design emphasizes high performance and low memory allocation over an extensive feature set. Built-in UTF-8 support optimizes the process of reading and writing JSON text encoded as UTF-8, which is the most prevalent encoding for data on the web and files on disk.

The library also provides classes for working with an in-memory document object model (DOM). This feature enables random access to the elements in a JSON file or string.

There are some limitations on what parts of the library you can use from Visual Basic code. For more information, see Visual Basic support.

How to get the library

The library is built-in as part of the shared framework for .NET Core 3.0 and later versions. The source generation feature is built-in as part of the shared framework for .NET 6 and later versions. Use of source generation requires .NET 5 SDK or later.

For framework versions earlier than .NET Core 3.0, install the System.Text.Json NuGet package. The package supports:

  • .NET Standard 2.0 and later
  • .NET Framework 4.7.2 and later
  • .NET Core 2.1 and later
  • .NET 5 and later

Run-time reflection vs. compile-time source generation

By default, System.Text.Json uses reflection to gather the metadata it needs to access properties of objects for serialization and deserialization at run time. As an alternative, System.Text.Json can use the C# source generation feature to improve performance, reduce private memory usage, and facilitate assembly trimming, which reduces app size. For more information, see How to choose reflection or source generation in System.Text.Json.

Security information

For information about security threats that were considered when designing JsonSerializer, and how they can be mitigated, see System.Text.Json Threat Model.

Thread safety

The System.Text.Json serializer was designed with thread safety in mind. Practically, this means that once locked, JsonSerializerOptions instances can be safely shared across multiple threads.

JsonDocument was designed to provide an immutable and thus thread-safe DOM representation for JSON values. However, due to a concurrency bug, JsonDocument is not currently thread safe.

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