web service and DataContractJsonSerializer : dealing with dictionary

Question

I'm building a web service on iis + asp.net and I'm stuck with a problem about JSON serialization. When using JSON.Net or JavaScriptSerializer, a dictionary is serialized as

{
 'key0':'value0',
 ...
 'keyN':'valueN',
}

but when it goes through the "ASP deserializer", a dictionary is serialized like this

[
 {Key:'key0',Value:'value0'},
 ...
 {Key:'keyN',Value:'valueN'}
]

I'm not familiar with ASP.net web services so I'm using a readymade template for visual studio. WHen I look in the web.config I see there are defintions for endpoints and behaviours. In one of those behaviour I see there's a reference to dataContractSerializer. This seems to be the serializer that is used under the hood when deserializing.

So my questions are :

• Does dataContractSerializer can be tweaked to serialize the sane way (by using a directive in the web config) ?

• Can I set another Serializer (JSON.net ?) for the endpoint in the web.config ?

My method currently outputs a Dictionary I change it to return a string (which I feed with my own serialization of my dictionary). But this didn't help much because the string get escaped by the default serializer that encloses it with '"'.

Can I override this ? By writing directly to the Response and ending the response ?

Please help me, I -really- don't want to change the existing client so I need to do it server side.