title: Exception: '<' is an invalid start of a value
body: <p>I have a Blazor Webassembly project with a controller method as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[HttpGet]
      public async Task&lt;List&lt;string&gt;&gt; GetStatesForProfile()
      {
          IConfigurationSection statesSection = configuration.GetSection("SiteSettings:States");
          var sections = statesSection.GetChildren();
          var states = statesSection.GetChildren().Select(s =&gt; s.Key).ToList&lt;string&gt;();
          return states;            
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The razor page calls this method:</p>
  
  <pre><code>private async Task&lt;bool&gt; GetStatesModel()
  {
      try
      {
          States = await http.GetJsonAsync&lt;List&lt;string&gt;&gt;("api/account/getstatesforprofile");            
          ...
      }
      catch (Exception ex)
      {
          Console.WriteLine($"Exception: {ex.Message}, Inner: {ex.InnerException.Message}");
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get this Exception:</p>
  
  <p>Exception: '&lt;' is an invalid start of a value.</p>
  
  <p>I read these values from appsettings.json file, And there is no '&lt;' in values.</p>
  
  <pre><code>{      
    "SiteSettings": {    
      "States": {
        "New York": ["NYC"],
        "California": ["Los Angeles", "San Francisco"]
      }
   }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Also I put a breakpoint in the controller method and it doesn't hit.
  What is this error? Is it from parsing json? and how to resolve this?</p>