WCF Services for ASP.NET AJAX Applications

Starting with ASP.NET 3.5, you can use Windows Communication Foundation to build AJAX-callable services. Overall, the developer's experience is mostly the same whether you use ASP.NET Web services or WCF services. Instead, the richness of the WCF platform—specifically designed to generate and support software services—is a no-brainer. A good question, then, is, "Why weren't WCF services available in ASP.NET AJAX pages before ASP.NET 3.5?"

Before the availability of the .NET Framework 3.5, the WCF platform had no built-in support for taking JSON as input and returning it as output. So what's does the .NET Framework 3.5 really do in the area of WCF? It basically empowers WCF to support JSON serialization. ...

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