Windows Communication Foundation

WCF is a runtime and set of APIs in .NET framework for building connected, service-oriented applicatons.

Difference with Web Services

Some of  the differences between WCF and Web service is that Web service only supports HTTP protocol. But WCF supports other protocols like TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, Named Pipes and MSMQ. Another major difference is that Web Services use XmlSerializer while WCF uses DataContractSerializer which is better in performance than XmlSerializer. Serialization in WCF.

ABC of WCF (msdn)

 

A - Address :  Where is the service

B - Binding : How do I talk to the service

C - Contract : What can the service do for me

 

Authentication and Authorization in WCF (MSDN)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff405740.aspx

You can also look in to this article series on MSDN about learning WCF.

Exception Handling in WCF

Handling exceptions in WCF is different than usual exceptions in .NET. Because WCF client may or may not base on .NET. Therefore we should have a generic way to pass exceptions to all types of clients. For this we have SOAP faults. 

SOAP faults are a way to propagate exceptions from service to the client application.  .NET framework has FaultException which can raise SoapFault exception. Here Service should throw FaultException<T> instead of usual CLR Exception object. T can be any type which can be serialized. 

WCF - Exception Handling

Resources

http://dotnet.dzone.com/articles/10-differences-between-wcf-and

SO - Is there any official WCF Logo 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/50114/wcf-wtf-does-wcf-raise-the-bar-or-just-the-complexity-level
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/139787/What-s-the-Difference-between-WCF-and-Web-Services

http://web.archive.org/web/20130430190551/http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/07/xmlserializer-vs-datacontractserializer-serialization-in-wcf/