What to choose? ASMX web service or WCF in .net 3.5?

Question

The current project i am working on is extensively using web services and is made in .net 3.5. Now as we are going for implementation of second phase we are confused if we shoul

Answer 1

The WCF model is vastly more flexible, essentially - if you only use it to present a basic http model using basic-profile and xml, with proxy objects - it'll appear very similar.

A brief list of differences though:

• much better support for emerging standards (although WSE2 and WSE3 are available for asmx, it is all much simpler in WCF)
• MTOM inbuilt (and fixes a known bug that I remember finding in WSE3 with MTOM)
• much wider range of supported transports/protocols etc, and the behaviours are fully configurable/extensible; for example allowing you to use a custom serializer/protocol/transport/etc seemlessly, just by changing the config
• much richer configuration, both at config and runtime
• full support for inspectors and custom principals
• ability to share object-models if you want
• you can host it outside of a web-server; a console exe or service, for example