WCF vs Web ServiceWCF:
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's unified
programming model for building service-oriented applications. It enables
developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that
integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments.
Web Service:
ASP.NET Web Services
support clients using HTTP-POST, HTTP-GET and SOAP protocols to invoke
methods exposed, depends on your specific requirement you choose one
method over the others. The main difference between HTTP-GET or
HTTP-POST and SOAP is the data types supported by SOAP is much richer
because SOAP used XSD schema to represent complex data types.
WCF vs Web Service:
1.WCF supports more of WS-* standards than web services
2.As I
mentioned in the article WCF supports multiple bindings
HTTP,TCP,MSMQ,WS-HTTP etc where as web service supports only HTTP.
3.WCF can maintain transactions like COM+
4.It has JSON integration
5.It can be hosted on IIS,WAS, Self hosting and windows services
6.Web services have no instance management ie you can not have a singleton web service or session full webservice
web services are not flexible. However, WCF Services are
flexible. If you make a new version of the service then you need to just
expose a new end. Therefore, services are agile and which is a very
practical approach looking at the current business trends.
We develop WCF as contracts, interface, operations, and data
contracts. As the developer we are more focused on the business logic
services and need not worry about channel stack. WCF is a unified
programming API for any kind of services so we create the service and
use configuration information to set up the communication mechanism like
HTTP/TCP/MSMQ etc