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c#visual-studiorestsoap

SOAP Services in Visual Studio 2012

When you want to create a SOAP web service in VS 2012, there is no project for this purpose and you must change the target framework to .NET framework 3.5.

I wanted to know that why SOAP service project is not available in .NET Framework 4 and newer versions? Is using SOAP service deprecated and restful web services preferred by Microsoft?

Solution

  • SOAP is an interoperability protocol which is not deprecated. There's no such thing as SOAP project in Visual Studio.

    In previous versions of .NET you could have created ASP.NET Web Services (you know the stuff with [WebMethod] and the .asmx extension). Those ASP.NET WebServices were using SOAP as transport protocol. They are deprecated. That's why there's no longer this option in newer versions.

    Couple of alternatives:

    • ASP.NET Web API (for more RESTful stuff)
    • WCF (if you need to support things like SOAP or other binary protocols)