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.