An introduction to Compact Binary Object Notation (CBOR) in .NET

In this post I provide a brief introduction to the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) format, discuss when and why you might want to use it, and then how to use the System.Formats.Cbor package in .NET. Background: data serialization and JSON Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a serialization format for data, so it takes structured data, and describes the series of bytes that represent that data. These bytes can be sent over the network or saved in a file (for example), and can then be deserialized to reconstruct a representation of the original data. One of the most common serialization formats these days, which essentially every developer will have used at one time or another, is the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, which uses a subset of JavaScript, for example: { "name": "Goose", "breed": "Labrador", "age": 8, "toys": ["ducky", "flamingo", "ice-cream"], "owner": { "name": "Sock" } } The JSON format has a number of desirable characteristics as a…