I'm building a Windows 8 Metro app (aka "Modern UI Style" or "Windows Store app") in HTML5/JavaScript consuming JSON Web Services and I'm bumping into the following issue: in which format should my JSON Web Services serialize dates for the Windows 8 Metro JSON.parse method to deserialize those in a date type?

I tried:

• sending dates using the ISO-8601 format, (JSON.parse returns a string),
• sending dates such as "/Date(1198908717056)/" as explained here (same result).

I'm starting to doubt that Windows 8's JSON.parse method supports dates as even when parsing the output of its own JSON.stringify method does not return a date type.

Example:

    var d = new Date(); // => a new date
    var str = JSON.stringify(d); // str is a string => "\"2012-07-10T14:44:00.000Z\""
    var date2 = JSON.parse(str); // date2 is a string => "2012-07-10T14:44:00.000Z"