[ACCEPTED]-What are the differences between a web service and a Windows service?-windows-services

They're about as different as two things 10 can be.

A Windows service is an application 9 that runs without a user being logged into 8 the system, usually to process some data 7 on the machine that needs no user intervention 6 to work with.

A Web service is a website 5 that, when contacted, returns XML (typically) in 4 one of several standard formats for the 3 service consumer to process.

One can't be 2 substituted for the other. They are fundamentally 1 different.

You are asking us to compare apples and 12 oranges. I am posting definitions as well 11 as links to further reading for you so you 10 can see why these two things are exclusive 9 and cannot be compared like you are trying 8 to do.

Web service:

Web services are frequently just 7 Internet application programming interfaces 6 (API) that can be accessed over a network, such 5 as the Internet, and executed on a remote 4 system hosting the requested services

Windows service:

A 3 Windows service is a long-running executable 2 that performs specific functions and which 1 is designed not to require user intervention.

A web service is an HTTP interface to a 5 system. For example: the Twitter API or 4 the Google Maps API are REST web services.

A 3 Windows Service is a background process 2 that runs without user interaction.

The two 1 are not related.

Webservices are simply a way of exposing 11 services for consumption. They are about 10 interaction between components.

A windows 9 service is an executable that runs for a 8 long time on a machine to perform some task.

You 7 wouldn't use one in place of the other - they 6 perform two entirely different functions.

For 5 (a simple) example (to highlight the difference), if 4 you wanted a method to pass control messages 3 to your service, you could expose a webservice 2 as the protocol through which third parties 1 would communicate with your service.

A web service is software system used for 6 machine to machine communication over a 5 network.

Here's the wiki for Web Service.

A windows service, in 4 contract, is a service that runs on an local 3 machine.

Here's the wiki for Windows Service.

They are independent 2 technologies, one would not replace the 1 other.

I don't think there is a very large difference, a 11 web service runs in IIS or Apache, a windows 10 service doesn't. You can call windows service 9 methods by using remoting and you can create 8 windows service with WCF. The methods of 7 a windows service can return xml or json 6 too.

IIS 6 doesn't support all the WCF possibilities 5 so we have build WCF windows services (this 4 is called self hosting).

Both a web service 3 and a windows service are apps that run 2 in the background. You can use WCF to build 1 both kind of services.

web service was mostly used in application 5 integration between systems.

windows service 4 was mostly used in background tasks, scheduled 3 tasks.

A windows service program can call 2 web service methods. web service program 1 cannot call window service methods.

A Web Service is a dll hosted by a web server 4 and run as a web application and can be 3 spun up upon request.

A windows service is 2 an exe hosted by the operating system and 1 runs continuously waiting on a request.