When creating Sample code it's often tedious to create sample data structures in code. In some situations using a JSON string and then encoding the string to JSON can save some time and make it much easier to visualize the data structure that's being built.
Microsoft recently released a community edition of Visual Studio that is essentially a full, non-restricted version of Visual Studio Professional. The community edition is available to most developers in small to medium sized business and public organizations for free. If you're doing Web development, or specifically using Web Connection and the Web Control Framework, be sure to check out Visual Studio's Community Edition.