Comparison of various bindings in WCF

In my previous post I had discussed the differences between WCF and Web-Services. In this post I am going to show the difference between the various bindings in the WCF.

Class name	Description	Transport	Message encoding	Security
BasicHttpBinding	A binding that is suitable for communication with WS-Basic Profile conformant Web Services like ASMX-based services. This binding uses HTTP as the transport and Text/XML as the message encoding.	HTTP	Text	None
WSHttpBinding	A secure and interoperable binding that is suitable for non-duplex service contracts.	HTTP	Text	Message
WSDualHttpBinding	A secure and interoperable binding that is suitable for duplex service contracts or communication through SOAP intermediaries.	HTTP	Text	Message
WSFederationHttpBinding	A secure and interoperable binding that supports the WS-Federation protocol, enabling organizations that are in a federation to efficiently authenticate and authorize users.	HTTP	Text	Message
NetTcpBinding	A secure and optimized binding suitable for cross-machine communication between WCF applications	TCP	Binary	Transport
NetPeerTcpBinding	A binding that enables secure, multi-machine communication.	P2P	Binary	Transport
NetNamedPipesBinding	A secure, reliable, optimized binding that is suitable for on-machine communication between WCF applications.	Named Pipes	Binary	Transport
NetMsmqBinding	A queued binding that is suitable for cross-machine communication between WCF applications.	MSMQ	Binary	Message
MsmqIntegrationBinding	A binding that is suitable for cross-machine communication between a WCF application and existing MSMQ applications.	MSMQ	doesn’t use a WCF message encoding – instead it lets you choose a pre-WCF serialization format	Transport

Further the most commonly used binding are BasicHttpBinding and WsHttpBinding. The difference between these two is as follows:

Criteria	BasicHttpBinding	WsHttpBinding
Security support	This supports the old ASMX style, i.e. WS-BasicProfile 1.1.	This exposes web services using WS-* specifications.
Compatibility	This is aimed for clients who do not have .NET 3.0 installed and it supports wider ranges of clients. Many of the clients like Windows 2000 still do not run .NET 3.0. So older version of .NET can consume this service.	As its built using WS-* specifications, it does not support wider ranges of client and it cannot be consumed by older .NET version less than 3 version.
Soap version	SOAP 1.1	SOAP 1.2 and WS-Addressing specification.
Reliable messaging	Not supported. In other words, if a client fires two or three calls you really do not know if they will return back in the same order.	Supported as it supports WS-* specifications.
Default security options	By default, there is no security provided for messages when the client calls happen. In other words, data is sent as plain text.	As WsHttBinding supports WS-*, it has WS-Security enabled by default. So the data is not sent in plain text.
Security options	None Windows – default authentication Basic Certificate	None Transport Message Transport with message credentials

The following video will make this more clear: