WCF => MVC as ASP.NET WebServices => ASP.NET Web Apps

I've been a .NET guy from the get go in my career, but within my work experience I have yet to venture out into the world of WCF or MVC. I think the difference is more framework / convention based with respect to WCF and MFC, correct me if I'm wrong.

But, what I'm really wonderin开发者_开发技巧g is this: Is it correct to say that WCF is to MVC as the regular ASP.NET WebServices are to the regular ASP.NET Web Apps? As in, WCF and MVC should be used together and regular ASP.NET WebServices and regular ASP.NET Web Apps should be used together? Or is it ok to intermix any combination of the 4?

Also, why would one not want to upgrade to WCF and / or MVC?

MVC is a convention based approach to ASP.NET web apps. I think you are correct there.

That analogy does not hold between ASP.NET web services and WCF, IMO.

Both ASP.NET web services and WCF are convention based programming paradigms. For e.g. both frameworks will match your SOAP call to a method implementation based on the name. Both will serialize data in the payload to your object model based on structure and field names, etc.

WCF provides a unified programming model for different transport types - TCP, named pipes, MSMQ, HTTP etc. It gives you more control over how your service is hosted. It gives you more control over how the payload is encoded.

I think it would be more accurate to say that WCF is a unification of .NET Remoting and ASP.NET WebServices, with great improvements in extension points.

Hope this helps.

That is wrong.

WCF is more than web services. ASP.NET MVC is primarily used for the web.

No, that analogy isn't correct, and yes, you can mix and match the technologies.

WCF vs. Web Services

Windows Communication Foundation is a framework for building service oriented applications, that handles a lot of plumbing for you out of the box (security, transactions, reliability, interop, etc). It's much more than just web services, though it does web services very well. So there really is very little comparison to web services, WCF is far superior.

MVC vs. Webforms

Both are viable options, both have relative strengths and relative weaknesses. They also are not mutually exclusive. You would NOT want to "upgrade" (it's not upgrading, it's changing) to MVC if your application is working perfectly fine on webforms, and your development team is productive on that platform. In this case there isn't any real world benefit to changing.

If however you are starting a new project, then you have to look at your development team and make a decision based on their skill set. Personally, if my development team has MVC experience, I choose MVC, but that does not mean that there is anything wrong with webforms.

I don't really think there is an analogical relationship between the respective pairs of technologies.

Windows Communication Foundation is a framework for sending and receiving data across a network channel that supports multiple transport and application protocols. Contrast this to ASP.NET Web Services, which really only supports RPC over HTTP(S).

ASP.NET MVC is a web application framework that represents Microsoft's implementation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. So, really, it's sort of a specialized type of ASP.NET Web Application, and not a replacement for (or analog to) ASP.NET Web Apps.

No not really, only in the sense that WCF and MVC are newer technologies.

WCF is a comprehensive communication framework that includes and supersedes old ASP.NET web services. It has no direct relationship with MVC. If you're building a service application from scratch tomorrow, you'd use WCF.

ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms are two different approaches to building web applications. MVC "goes with the grain" of the web, being URI oriented, whilst Web Forms attempts to hide the nature of the web by creating a stateful, WinForms like, programming model. Which you choose to use will come down to the nature of your application and the skills of your developers.