Web Services — WCF vs. ASMX (“Standard”)

Question

I am working on a new project. Is there any benefit with going with a WCF web service over a regular old fashion web service?

Visual Studio offers templates for both

Answer 1

In my experience

WCF

It is absurdly verbose to work with it, it is not quite compatible with other microsoft products and, of course, it is not widely accepted outside ot the microsoft world.

But my main problem is it is not stable, it trends to fail (in some situation) and it requires to tweak it before it can be used.

Instead

SOAP (aka standard Webservice), it works, it is easy to work and it is widely compatible (Java-JAX accepts it without any modification).

To add authentication in SOAP could be a bit tricky but not impossible.