I’m sure this should be easier than it is….
So far I’ve used WCF REST Starter Kit and been following REST in WCF guidelines.
In particular A Guide to Designing and Building RESTful Web Services with WCF 3.5 is useful as is the video “Building resource singleton services with WCF starter kit“.
Also these screencasts are worth a watch.
I’ve had the same issue. REST in WCF is not easy.
Thinking of using OpenRasta or OData services next time!
In MVC it’s a doddle. You can just return a JSON result in a controller method.
As for ‘traditional’ web forms I suppse you could use an ashx file if you didn’t get WCF working but it doesn’t have the JSON infrastructure baked in. All in all it’s a faff for something that is trivial in other dev stacks.
On top of testable code, the ability to quickly choose return type (html => return View(model), Json => return Json(model) ) is a major plus for MVC