Duplicate: although this is a good discussion, this is a duplicate of Web Services — WCF vs. Standard. Please consider adding any new information to the earlier question and closing this one.
Could anyone recommend me some documents to describe why WCF is better than legacy ASP.Net web services? I am especially interested in performance and security. Thanks!
WCF is much more flexible:
but also: can be used over NetTCP, MSMQ, wsHttp and so on
WCF services can be hosted in IIS (like legacy ASMX)
but WCF services can also be self-hosted in a console app, Windows NT Service, etc.
WCF offers a lot more security features and security levels than ASMX (message security etc.)
In WCF, almost anything is configurable in a config file - much more so than with ASMX.
I don't have any ready-made documents at hand that describe this - but that's really the essence of it, I'd say.
Marc
PS: Not sure if this one would contain anything useful for you:
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?kw=remoting&docid=270830
PPS: you would think that Microsoft would have heaps of these white papers to convince folks - but no..... :-)
George,
I don't have any such documents handy, because it's so obvious why WCF is better.
First, because of Microsoft: ASMX Web Services are a “Legacy Technology”. They're also publicly stating that they will not be making changes to WSDL.EXE and other parts of the ASMX technology. We have enough trouble in this Industry with legacy technology and applications - it makes no sense to create a new piece of legacy code today.
Second, WCF abstracts the concepts that are part of ASMX, Remoting, and WSE. "Anything they can do, WCF can do better".
To put it simply, you're question is the equivalent of "Why is .NET better than VB6". Given enough time, any legacy technology will become a maintenance / financial burdon.
As you've asked about security and performance in particular, I would say "it depends". It is possible to make either option secure and performance is largely down to the code you write. One plus side for WCF performance is that you don't have to host it within IIS - so you have more options and flexibility to make it performant.
WCF is a higly configurable stack with almost infinite combinations of serialization, security, transport etc. For your specific question WCF implements WS-* protocols including both transport and message security. WCF datacontract serializer is substantially faster than xmlserialzer used in acmx. The Net.Tcp transport is also more performant than http based transport.
I found a performance comparison here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx