I recently needed to serialize a datatable to JSON. Where I'm at we're still on .Net 2.0, so I can't use the JSON serializer in .Net 3.5. I figured this must have been done before, so I went looking online and found a number of different options. Some of them depend on an additional library, which I would have a hard time pushing through here. Others require first converting to List<Dictionary<>>, which seemed a little awkward and needless. Another treated all values like a string. For one reason or another I couldn't really get behind any of them, so I decided to roll my own, which is posted below.
As you can see from reading the //TODO comments, it's incomplete in a few places. This code is already in production here, so it does "work" in the basic sense. The places where it's incomplete are places where we know our production data won't currently hit it (no timespans or byte arrays in the db). The reason I'm posting here is that I feel like this can be a little better, and I'd like help finishing and improving this code. Any input welcome.
Note that this capability is built into .Net 3.5 and later, and so the only reason to use this code today is if you're still limited to .Net 2.0. Even then, JSON.Net has become the goto library for this kind of thing.
public static class JSONHelper
{
public static string FromDataTable(DataTable dt)
{
string rowDelimiter = "";