A Direct Comparison of WCF and ASP.NET Core Functionalities

A lot of money and energy was invested by Microsoft to develop ASP.NET Core. This is an open source platform to which features and services can be added by the wider developer community. Some assume that ASP.NET Core has multiple advantages over other open source platforms like WCF. But this is not always the case; let's have a close look at the matter.

In this article, our main focus is to compare the performance of WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and ASP.NET Core, so that you can decide for yourself which technology is best for you. To judge the performance of both the platforms, let us take a simple example – “stand up a local web server.” Let's check how much time it takes for the web server to generate a request, how much time it takes to route the request, serialize the request, to create a response, and send the response back and deserialize it.

The results were a bit surprising: WCF is almost three times faster when compared to ASP.NET Core functionalities. WCF depends on XML to serialize requests, while ASP.NET Core is using JSON for the same purpose. As a result, WCF is much faster and the preferable option here. At the same time, when developers try a different approach, ASP.NET Core performance become sslightly better in that particular case.

ASP.NET Core - The Winning Features

The ASP.NET Core platform has a plethora of features that help you to overcome development challenges. Obviously, you can do more with your applications and boost the overall performance of your product.

Cross-Platform Features

The ASP.NET Core platform helps you to create universal apps that are compatible with different operating systems like Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Microsoft is putting maximum effort into making Linux a leading platform on which on which to run ASP.NET apps.

Excellent Performance Standards

Performance is the most critical feature of any software product and ASP.NET Core is one of the most popular web application frameworks available. The technology is almost 15 years old and features are constantly being added to the framework based on user requirements and changing technology advancements. Recently, the model has been redesigned to make it asynchronous, faster, and lightweight.

Asynchronous Programming Model

Another popular feature of the ASP.NET Core framework is asynchronous programming patterns. Traditional apps spend most of their time completing CPU cycles, database queries, and other I/O operations. The asynchronous programming model makes the framework really fast and adaptable.

Unified Web API Frameworks

Before the ASP.NET framework, apps were developed using MVC and Web API frameworks. With the ASP.NET Core framework, all platforms have been merged together into a single unified framework. Combining all the frameworks together is a positive move that helps to simplify development challenges.

Suitable Development Environments

Another popular feature (which is my favorite) is the suitable development environments functionality. With multiple development environments, it is easy to separate out code on the basis of behavior, staging, production, development, etc. Prior to ASP.NET Core, examining code behavior was almost impossible.

Action Filters

ASP.NET gives extensible support to action filters that can be applied to the controller without making any changes to the actions themselves. Technically, filters can be used for multiple purposes like error handling, caching, authorization or custom logic implementation, etc.

Self-Hosted Web Application

It is possible to create a self-hosted web application in multiple ways. One of the greatest achievements of the ASP.NET Core framework is essentially a web console application. This signifies that ASP.NET apps can be deployed to the use-cases that are not server based.

ASP.NET is a nice update to other web application frameworks. Few of its features already exist and others are added frequently by the developer community. When performance monitoring is important for any application, you will definitely like to opt for ASP.NET Core over WCF.

In some cases, there are chances that other technologies like WCF may witness high performance in the beginning, but ASP.NET Core is the ultimate winner in the race. Also, you just need to select the right area for benchmarking so that right pieces of code can be improved.