Creating Versatile Web Services sustaining high load - .NET

Question

Hello

I've a multi user web tool which makes use of a intermediate web service to communicate with an external datasource. The application makes frequent calls to the web service and it may involve intense data transfer, sometimes.

I want to make a scalable architecture where thousands of users can make use of the web service at the same time and have it reliable.

So what kind of Web Services model or protocols should i prefer as i see lot of types such as REST, WCF, SOAP etc. which i'm not much familiar with. But i'm very much used to stand ASP.NET webservices using SOAP.

Thank you

NLV

Answer 1

WCF would be a great technology for this... Considering you are controlling the web service client and server, you won't be restricted by basicHttpBinding and you can utilize Reliable Sessions to ensure guaranteed Delivery.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480191.aspx

This solution will also scale easily, when one server gets taxed you can throw more servers at it with ease.