Web Service vs WCF Service

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This answer is based on an article that no longer exists:

Summary of article:

“Basically, WCF is a service layer that allows you to build applications that can communicate using a variety of communication mechanisms. With it, you can communicate using Peer to Peer, Named Pipes, Web Services and so on.

You can’t compare them because WCF is a framework for building interoperable applications. If you like, you can think of it as a SOA enabler. What does this mean?

Well, WCF conforms to something known as ABC, where A is the address of the service that you want to communicate with, B stands for the binding and C stands for the contract. This is important because it is possible to change the binding without necessarily changing the code. The contract is much more powerful because it forces the separation of the contract from the implementation. This means that the contract is defined in an interface, and there is a concrete implementation which is bound to by the consumer using the same idea of the contract. The datamodel is abstracted out.”

… later …

“should use WCF when we need to communicate with other communication technologies (e,.g. Peer to Peer, Named Pipes) rather than Web Service”

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