Unable to get my fix on WCF during the heros community launch, I sought more information to understand WCF and its pros and cons. If you are thinking about the same thing, you will find this MSDN article useful. It provides a high-level performance comparison between WCF and existing .NET distributed communication technologies.
There is another MSDN article that touches on migrating web services to WCF and lists potential benefits of WCF relative to ASP.NET Web services. WCF has an ASP.NET compatibility mode option to enable WCF applications to be programmed and configured like ASP.NET Web services, and mimic their behavior. Read up this MSDN article that compare ASP.NET Web services and WCF based on what is required to develop applications using both technologies.
Writing your first WCF service is fairly simple. Fire up VS2008, create a new project, select your choice of language, select WCF under Project types and select the WCF Service Library template. Hit F5 and you have a ready sample WCF service running.
Should you want to learn more, here are the links to hands-on labs: introduction, advanced and one with MSMQ. Virtual labs can be found here on http://netfx3.com/Labs/. Have fun!
Sometime back talking to attendees for Hands-on Labs, I found that quite a number of them do not know how to start developing WCF Services, even though they know how to write web services. I have written a descriptive article Your First WCF Service on my blog that shows how to start. Although there are hands-on labs freely available online, some of you might just want to read through to get some ideas and a headstart.
On top of that, I have written another (lenghty) tutorial on developing a Silverlight Application to consume WCF Service. I will also be adding another article on Silverlight authentication using WCF Services just like how you would do it in an ASP.NET Web Application. It is an "unofficial" method and drop me a comment and let me know if you find any other "official" and better authentication mechanism.