Member-only story
If you are a .NET developer, you must have heard/used a nuget package called Newtonsoft.Json (or JSON.NET). The package is maintained by a legendary developer named James Newton-King.
Someone may argue that James may not be the most famous OSS developer in the .NET world. (How about Miguel De Icaza?) But nuget.org never lies. It hosts all .NET public packages all over the world.
What’s Newtonsoft.Json
Json.NET is a popular high-performance JSON framework for .NET. It can serialize and deserialize JSON code
Here is the summary from James’s LinkedIn about this package
• Used by Visual Studio, .NET, ASP.NET, SignalR, Windows Azure
• Most popular .NET open source library
• Most downloaded library on nuget.org
It’s undoubtedly the most popular nuget package in the .NET world. Someone may challenge this. But nuget.org statistics may give you the answer.
The package ranks top 1 in the nuget packages list. And it has 5.1 Billion downloads so far. The second package Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection only has 3.7B downloads and it’s a Microsoft maintained library. Newtonsoft.Json is the only library owned by individuals but can defeat all Microsoft-owned packages.
