WCF Service vs ASP.NET Web Api

Question

Can any one share the actual difference between WCF Service and ASP.NET Web Api? In which scenario we have to use WCF Service and ASP.NET Web Api.

Answer 1

WCF Web API is the next generation of Microsoft's service framework.

WCF Services were originally designed with a channel architecture allowing customization of the protocols and transports used to communicate between systems. While this gives the architect/developer great flexibility in building inter-operable applications, it comes at the cost of complexity. Configuring WCF has never been simple (IMO).

The most prevalent use case (IMO), is using WCF services to provide support to web applications via ajax requests from the browser for additional data. Also, since the time that WCF was originally introduced, it has become common for applications to provide an API using http.

Because the of this, the new WCF Web API is an attempt to simplify the service infrastructure and assume the http transport protocol.

If you are building a new web application, I would use the new Web API. I would only look at using WCF Services if I needed to communicate with another system using something other http.

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WCF Channel Architecture

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms729840.aspx

WCF Web API

http://www.asp.net/web-api

Answer 2

From http://mattmilner.com/Milner/Blog/post/2012/02/28/WebAPI-or-WCF.aspx, a great post on this issue: "WCF remains the framework for building services where you care about transport flexibility. Web API is the framework for building services where you care about HTTP."