.NET Dojo (WCF vs. *.asmx)

Recently I attended the .NET Dojo event here in Houston, where Steven Fulcher talked about WCF and its implementation. Early on, I found myself trying to figure out how I, as an ASP.NET developer already using *.asmx services, would truly benefit from this technology. At first glance, you might take it as a proprietary wrapper SOAP, POX (plain old xml), REST and other web programming models that already exist.  However, as we plowed forward through the examples and hands-on labs, the power and flexibility gained by adding WCF to your distributed architecture becomes prevalent.

I won’t go into a lot of detail but simply point out the feature that stands out to me, WCF Security.

By making simple configuration changes, the data returned by your service can be encrypted, even over http://.

…other stuff here

<endpoint address=""

                                    binding="wsHttpBinding"

                                    contract="MyService.IMyServiceInterface" />

                        </service>

</services>

</system.serviceModel>

By modifying the endpoint configuration in your web.config or app.config , depending on what type of service host you choose, setting its binding to “wsHttpBinding”, you will encrypt the data.  This is something that isn’t possible via the *.asmx services that are currently being used in many applications.

There are many tutorials and labs available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663324.aspx so take a look.