DataContractJsonSerializer exception

Could it be caused by your JSON names not matching your property names in C#?

My understanding is that

{     "FirstName" : "Mark"}

Would be able to deserialize into:

[DataContract]public class Person {         [DataMember]     public string FirstName {get; set;}}

but this wouldn't be able to serialize

{     "Name" : "Mark"}

unless you changed your C# class to have an explicit name for the DataMember

[DataContract]public class Person {         [DataMember(Name="Name")]     public string FirstName {get; set;}}

I'm not sure which error this would cause though. I Don't have enough first hand experience.

Do you think it could be an encoding problem? Have you tried using Encoding.UTF8 instead of Unicode?

All the examples I have seen using DataContractSerializer have used a UTF-8 encoding.

Encoding.Unicode is a UTF-16 encoding.

I can't find any documentation explicitly stating which encodings DataContractSerializer supports. I assume it would be smart enough to detect the proper encoding, but I don't know a whole whole lot about encodings. Maybe that isn't really possible in this instance.