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WCF versus ASMX web services

This topic describes some of the differences between the WCF .SVC and the .ASMX web services. Web services in both technologies (WCF .SVC and .ASMX) are deprecated.

Differences in parameters
No AuthenticationContext parameter

Since claims based security standards drive all the WCF .SVC web services, the AuthenticationContext parameter was removed.

For more information about how to authenticating for WCF .SVC web services, refer to the topic about Authenticating users through the API.

No typed parameters
The parameters described in the classes are the typed parameters which are used by the .ASMX web services. The parameters used in the .SVC web services don't have a "ps" prefix to indicate that it is a string parameter or a "psOut" prefix to indicate that it is a output parameter of type string.
No empty result

Since the Web Services 2.5 throw an exception, they don't return an exception number in the return parameter anymore. However the Web Services 2.5 .ASMX web services still return an empty string for backwards compatibility. With the introduction of the new .SVC web services, we have removed that empty result. As a result, the only output parameter might become the result of a function instead of the output parameter of the procedure.

What are the .SVC web services URLs?
The URLs of the .SVC web services have the following structure:
<web service URL>/Wcf/<API version>/<classname without version nuber>.svc
The following table provides some examples:
Class nameASMXSVC
Application 2.5Application25.asmxWcf/API25/Application.svc
DocumentObj 2.0DocumentObj20.asmxWcf/API20/DocumentObj.svc
DocumentObj 2.5DocumentObj25.asmxWcf/API25/DocumentObj.svc
Publication 2.0Publication20.asmxWcf/API20/Publication.svc
PublicationOutput 2.0PublicationOutput20.asmxWcf/API20/PublicationOutput.svc
PublicationOutput 2.5PublicationOutput25.asmxWcf/API25/PublicationOutput.svc
User 2.5User25.asmxWcf/API25/User.svc
ConditionManagement 1.0ConditionManagement.asmxWcf/API/ConditionManagement.svc
...