Access deserialize JSON and avoid var declaration - vb.net

Question

I'm completely new to vb (started about 2 hours ago) and I'm trying to convert a php application to vb to circumnavigate some unavoidable problems.
However I'm trying to get a response from a server that returns a JSON string as page source(everythng is fine untill here), my problem is that I don't understand exactly how to access the deserialized object.
This is the response:
{
"response":{
"a":"boolean",
"b":"string",
"c":"string",
"d":"string",
"e":"string",
"f":"string",
"profile":{
"h":"decimal",
"i":"string",
"l":"string",
"m":"string",
"n":"string",
"o":"string",
"p":"string",
"q":"string"
}
}
}
Current vb code:
Public Class Form1
...
Dim jsonResponse As String = New System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString(url)
Dim r As LoginReturn = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(Of LoginReturn)(jsonResponse)
...
End Sub
Public Class LoginItem
Public a As Boolean
Public apikey As String
Public c As String
Public d As String
Public e As String
Public f As String
Public Property profile As List(Of LoginProfile)
End Class
Public Class LoginProfile
Public h As Decimal
Public i As String
Public l As String
Public m As String
Public n As String
Public o As String
Public p As String
Public q As String
End Class
Public Class LoginResponse
Public Property response As List(Of LoginItem)
End Class
Public Class LoginReturn
Public Property value As List(Of LoginResponse)
End Class
From all those infomation I only need apikey so I tried to access it with these
r.value.response.apikey
r.value(0).response.apikey
Both returns this error:
'apikey' is not a memeber of 'System.Collections.Generic.List(Of WindowsApplication1.LoginItem)'.
Previously with php I used this:
$r = json_decode(file_get_contents($url));
$_SESSION['a']=$r->response->apikey
So my questions are:
How do I access that information?
Do I need to declare all those variables even if I don't need them?
EDIT SOLUTION
'Get Json
Dim jsonResponse As String = New System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString(url)
'Parse Json
Dim r As JObject = JObject.Parse(jsonResponse)
'Access Json
GlobalVar.api = r("response")("apikey")

Answer 1

This will show you how to parse the raw JSON so you can pluck out the part you are interested in. Since you only want one thing, you can use JObject.Parse and forego the classes to get what you want.
' you would get it from the webclient
Dim jstr As String = File.ReadAllText("C:\Temp\logresp.json")
Dim api = obj("response")("b")
To read something else, just change the key to whatever item you want. For instance, to read "q":
Dim QItem = obj("response")("profile")("q")
Since q is a property of profile, which itself is a child of response you have to dig deeper.
If you do end up needing many things, your classes are not quite right for parsing into a class (DeserializeObject). Look at the JSON and you'll see there is no property named "APIKey". Going by position, it is called "b". This might be an artifact of changing things around for posting here, but I can only go by what is posted.