Any reason to use WCF to consume non-UTF services?
<p>I'm confused about the usefulness of WCF in consuming non-UTF services. I decided to try and give it a go, in lieu of .NET 2 web services, and quickly discovered that out-of-box it cannot consume ISO-8859-1 web services. After googling a bit I learned that you need to create a custom message encoder (i.e. <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751486.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751486.aspx</a>).</p>

<p>Comparably, if I wanted to use .NET 2's web service model, I just add a reference and it works - no need to write a custom encoder. I've decided to use the easier of the two methods, since I can't justify writing and testing a bunch of code I don't need.</p>

<p>I am however curious why anyone would use WCF when they could use the faster 2.0 method. This is a rudimentary question - I'm new to web services, and just using them to pull data from several third party vendors. All I need is the ability to consume the service, throw some credentials, call methods, and get objects back - I'm assuming WCF goes above and beyond that, somehow.</p>
