Republished with Permission - Original Article

Earlier this year I blogged about a new language extensibility feature of C# and VB called "Extension Methods". 

Extension methods allow developers to add new methods to the public contract of an existing CLR type, without having to sub-class it or recompile the original type.  In doing so they enable a variety of useful scenarios (including LINQ).  They also provide a really convenient way to add a dash of "syntactic sugar" into your code.

Over the last few months I've been making a list of cool extension methods that I plan to sit down and implement when I get some free time (not sure when that is... but at least I can still have fun coming up with the ideas!)  Two of the scenarios I added to my extension method list were easy methods to automate generating JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or XML serialization strings for any .NET object.