Thank you for the advice on using url.Content I will do that for sure.

I actually figured out what the problem was. I am using MVC2, with that I needed to add the following to my controller return statement

JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet

so the return now looks like:

return Json(jsondata,JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

and it works perfectly!

I appreciate your help, you really helped me understand what was working and that I needed to look else where in the code to find the problem.