No, not the kind commonly found on the Internet, which is often anything but. Rather, C#’s Anonymous types, introduced way back in 2007 with C# 3.0 and more often than not ignored by me until now.

I used to avoid JSON. Its syntax seemed just like every other delimited format I’d ever seen. In short, a headache to parse. XML is more verbose. Yet (at least for me) more humanly readable. That was until I found two things:

1. XML parsing across different browsers is an even bigger headache
2. With JSON I can create almost identical classes on both a C# server and a Javascript client

Later, the relationship was strengthened by the discovery of services like http://json2csharp.com/, which will create a C# class for you out of a JSON sample, as will more recent versions of Visual Studio. That’s great for dealing with someone else’s API output.

But sometimes a class seems like overkill. What if you have just one place where you really, really need to send just a bit of JSON to the client? For example, in one of my SignalR hubs, I need to send three things:

1. brief message
2. start time
3. end time

SignalR, by the way, always sends JSON so all you need is some way to package (enclassulate?)  your data. Enter the Anonymous type, which if you use Linq you’ve probably already seen many times, e.g:

var productQuery =
    from prod in products
    select new { prod.Color, prod.Price };

foreach (var v in productQuery)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Color={0}, Price={1}", v.Color, v.Price);
}

With a var, the usage is basic: “var foo = new { someData = “something” };” Anonymous types support nesting too, so I was able to tidily separate my message data from my duration data. Here’s a sample method in the SignalR hub on the server:

public void AnonTypeDemo(string groupID)
{
    var startTime = DateTime.UtcNow;

    var endTime = startTime + TimeSpan.FromMinutes(10);

    // the anonymous type
    var data = new { message = "started", duration = new { startTime, endTime } };

    Clients.Group(groupID).anonTypeDemo(data);
}

The method sends a JSON string that looks like this:

{
    "message": "started",
    "duration": {
        "startTime": "2015-02-24T18:19:48.8008904Z",
        "endTime": "2015-02-24T18:29:48.8008904Z"
    }
}

On the client side, a Javascript method will be called by the SignalR client to process the received data:

myHub.client.anonTypeDemo = function (data) {

    console.log(data);

    var message = data.message;

    var startTime = data.duration.startTime;
    var endTime = data.duration.endTime;
}

And that’s all he wrote.