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It sounds like you're parsing the JSON straight into your business objects, which is the source of the problem. You need an intermediate class which represents a strongly-typed version of the JSON message. So JSON.net goes from a JSON string into this message object, then you write your own code (or, if it works for you, use a tool like automapper), to go from that into your business classes.

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This is what I settled on -- at least in the hard cases. And if I understand his acronyms, it's also what @mythz is recommending.

Perhaps I should have done it for the easy cases as well (where the business objects are struct-like enough that it doesn't matter) and just lived with the boilerplate.

But I see little advantage in this over just having a dictionary that I can inspect to initialise my real business object. True that is not strongly-typed, but the stage between the message-object and the business object can have validation errors anyway, so why not treat typechecking as part of that?

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