WCF vs Web Services

Most useful and most asked question in an interview is WCF vs Web Services.
It could be asked in various form like Why WCF is better than Web Services

WCF and Web Services both are the implementation of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), both are SOAP-based services.

WCF supports other formats as well apart from SOAP but Web Service support SOAP only.

As we know there are various techniques to create distributes system. Some of them are Web Service,.Net Remoting.

Sometimes there may be the scenario that which technology should we use to develop a distributed application. And if there is a requirement for enhancement then how difficult would it be to switch over among technologies.

WCF is the solution for all these queries. WCF is the unified technology to create a distributed system which is not dependent on OS platform, Protocols to use and many more.

Let’s look at differences between WCF and Web Service.

Read this - What is Microservice Architecture?

WCF	Web Service
Multiple hosting options – IIS, Self Hosting, WAS Hosting	IIS hosting is the only option
HTTP, TCP, MSMQ, Named Pipe protocol supported	HTTP and HTTPS only
Multiple message pattern like  XML, JSON, Plain Text format supported	Support XML only.
WCF supports REST Pattern	Web service does not support REST
WCF has the various contract like Operation Contract, Data Contract, Message Contract, Fault Contract	Web Services has Web Methods
WCF was released in .Net framework 3.0	Web Service was released in ASP.Net 2.0
WCF uses ServiceBehavior class to support multithreading	Web Service does not support multi-threading
WCF service uses [Servicecontract], [OperationContract] attributes	Web Service uses [WebMethod] attributes