Application Services Vs WCF Services

Question

What's the difference between Application Services and WCF Services ?

In a distributed environment :

Presentation => WCF => Application Logic => DataStore

Should i consider Application Logic "Services" as also WCF Services, or may i create seperate WCF services that exposes some Application Logic "Services" to client with DTO <=> Entites transformation logic ?

Answer 1

WCF is a generic technology for building remote services, while application services are concrete services provided by ASP.NET (for example, forms authentication). They are not mutually exclusive concepts and you can for example access application services via WCF. See here for more details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t745kdsh.aspx