HI, Gerard,

Just a couple of things (I'm sure you think you're getting more than you bargained for, from your original question, but these are things that .NET developers should be aware of)

WCF provides a common programming model for web services, HTTP, TCP remoting, distributed transactions, and queued messaging. WCF addresses issues where developers might otherwise build different code bases for each of these communication protocols. It takes some time to learn....there's some new vocabulary like Address definitions, Contracts, and Bindings (the "ABC"s of WCF)....but it's worth it.

One question...are you going to host this service inside IIS? (or had you gotten that far, with regards to how you were doing to host it)...

Kevin