> I'm curious about the differences between the WCF an ASP.NET implementations of web services in particular I've also had no occasion to do anything practical with this but do see one thing in WCF I like better:
>ASP.NET, as standard, just serializes *all* public members of an object. WCF, OTOH, has the [DataContract] and [DataMember] attributes which would allow me to be more selective in what gets serialized (e.g. including private variables). But I guess none of this changes the use of the DataSet.GetXML() method.....

I'm hoping to play with this stuff soon, but don't know if I'll be able to figure out the differences in implementations between WCF and ASP.NET. I probably don't really care; I just want my web services to be able to be called from any platform (and it sounds like that's not a problem).

The WCF serialization would only affect me if I decide to NOT go the DataSet.GetXml() route with whatever applications I'm going to be building next ... but I think, for cross-platform compatibilty, DataSet.GetXml() might be the easiest/best option. I don't really know for sure ... having been stuck in my current mode of thinking for 7 years, I probably should research some of this a bit more extensively while I have the time. <g>

~~Bonnie



>
>>And here's what I'm curious about (haven't had time to play with any of this in the past year or two, but plan to look into it now):
>>
>>I've always constructed my asmx web services to accept and return simple datatypes, such that they are compatible with different platforms ... IOW, they can be consumed by non-.NET applications. Consequently, when I returned a DataSet, I did *not* return a serialized DataSet class, but returned the data itself, serialized into XML ... return MyDataSet.GetXml(); ... which is simply a string of simple XML that can be read and utilized by any app, not just a .NET app.
>>
>>Given the above scenario, and assuming that I want the same sort of interopability with other platforms, I'm assuming that the main thing that WCF gives me is the flexibility of using my service in different ways (Remoting and queuing) ... even if I want to keep my simply datatypes. Is this a fair assumption to make?
>>
>>~~Bonnie