Why ASMX web services are not an excuse anymore with WCF 4.0

ASXM web services has been the favorite choice for many developers for building soap web services in .NET during a long time because of its simplicity. With ASMX web services, you get a web service up and running in a matter of seconds, as it does not require any configuration. The only thing you need to do is to build the service implementation and the message contracts (xml serialization classes), and that’s all. However, when you build a system as a black box with most of the configuration hardcoded, and only a few extensibility points in mind, you will probably end up with something that is very easy to deploy and get running, but it can not be customized at all. That’s what an ASMX web service is after all, you don’t have a way easily change the protocol versions, encoders, security or even extend with custom functionality (SOAP extensions are the only entry point for extensibility, which work as message inspectors in WCF).

On the other hand, you have WCF, which is extensible beast for building services among other things. The number of extensibility points that you will find in WCF is extremely high, but the downside is that configuration also becomes extremely complex and a nightmare for most developers that only want to get their services up and running.

Fortunately, the WCF team has considerably improved the configuration experience in WCF 4.0, making possible to run a service with almost no configuration. The approach that they have taken for this version is to make everything work with no configuration, and give the chance to override what you actually need for a given scenario.

For instance, a WCF service that uses http as transport behaves a ASMX web service by default (it uses basicHttpBinding with SOAP 1.2, transport security, text encoding and Basic profile 1.1) unless you change that. So, how can you create a new WCF service as you did before with ASMX ?. That’s simple and you need to follow these steps,

Read more: Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax)

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