I know returning types in a wcv service is allowed, and it will convert the object to json. But what if I don't want to return a random type, but return a string with formatted json? I can construct json my self but it can a) be messy, and b) not auto encode html values.
How do I do build a custom formatted json string? Off the top of my had, can I return a dictionary with key, value pairs? Will the value be encoded so you can transmitted without running the risk of malformed json?
You can specify a return type of object and then use an anonymous type to return an arbitrary object. If you want to return an arbitrary collection, you can return IEnumerable, and use that to return a collection of anonymous types.
Have a look at JSON.Net. I've used it in the past for serializing/deserializing to/from Json. It also (according to the web page) has support for converting Json to/from XML, so it seems reasonable that there would be some functions in there to build arbitrary Json strings in a way that is less error-prone than doing it yourself.