.net – Difference between web reference and service reference

asmxnetwcf

What is the difference between web reference and service reference in WCF?
Which is preferable in WCF?

Best Answer

The low-level answer here is that a Web Reference will create a client proxy class that allows your code to talk to a Web Service that is described via WSDL and communicates via SOAP or HTTP GET (other posters indicate that it is only ASMX, but Web References can also talk to Java-based Web Services or Python-based or Ruby so long as they all talk WSDL and conform to the WS-I interoperability standard).

A Service Reference will create a client proxy class that communicates with a WCF-based service : regardless of whether that WCF service is a Web Service or not.