difference between WCF Services and Web Services and REST Service

Question

What is the difference between WCF Services and Web Services in .net
When should I use WCF and when to use Web Services.Is REST and WCF service the same? Thanks

Answer 1

Web Service is an abstract term encompassing a large variety of data providers for distributed systems. Perhaps you are referring to ASMX web services, which can still be found in the wild but aren't really widely used in new development these days.

WCF Service is Microsoft's implementation of SOAP. There are others implementations or you could roll your own (not recommended).

SOAP is a kind of stateful, session-based, message-based web service. It's good if your service is designed as a set of complex actions.

REST is a stateless, sessionless, resource-based web service. It's good if your service is designed to access data and perform simple CRUD operations on it. SOAP and REST are mutually exclusive. A service cannot be both. There are ways to manipulate vanilla WCF to make is RESTful but these techniques are becoming deprecated. If you want to implement a RESTful web service there are two main choices in the Microsoft world: WCF Data Services and ASP.NET Web API.

Answer 2

REST is an architecture

WCF is a API in .NET Framework to build connected service oriented application.

In olden days a functionality developed as Web Service was accessible via internet and the same to be available on local network was available via Remoting.

Using WCF we don't need to develop different code for it to be accessible over internet and on local network. Just configuring it with bindings would be enough.

Answer 3

That is a very wide question...I am going to just give a brief high-level answer and suggest that you do some more searching as there are is already a lot written on each subject. But, hopefully this should give you a push in the right direction.

First, typically when people refer to WCF Services and Web Services, they are referring to the newer WCF conventions that make service calls fairly generic (they can be SOAP, REST, etc) and the old .asmx SOAP method of Web Services. So, along these lines, I would suggest looking more into WCF and SOAP/.ASMX for the difference of WCF and older Web Services.

As to WCF and REST, they are not the same. REST is more of an architecture, whereas WCF is a framework. As I already mentioned, WCF can be used to make SOAP calls or REST calls. I am not sure I can add much more without going into greater detail.

I will see if I can find some good articles on REST and WCF a little later, though. Personally, I do not see a reason to even pursue very far into the older way of calling web services (.ASMX pages) as WCF has pretty much made that obsolete. However, learning many different ways to skin a cat can be useful in an endeavor to find what fits you best.

Again, this is VERY high level, but these are very general topics with a lot surrounding each, so hopefully a high level overview will help direct you in studying deeper on each subject.

Answer 4

Some people mean "ASMX" when they say "Web Services".

Others just use "Web Services" to mean the generic technology, and consider WCF to be the current way to create Web Services on the .NET platform. The other kind are "ASMX Web Services", as distinguished from "WCF Web Services".

The "other kind" are a legacy technology, supported only for backwards compatibility. They should not be used for new development, so there's no point in you learning about them.

As others have stated, "REST" is an architecture style, not a technology.