There's a big confusion among WCF developers while understanding the concept of Message Contracts. Are they really required? Why were they included in WCF when Data Contracts can do everything.
Well the truth is that both Message Contracts and Data Contracts possess their own niche in SOAP messaging. In the below table, I'll be drawing a thick line to show differences between Message Contracts and Data Contracts
| Data Contracts | Message Contracts |
| Data Contracts primarily target the XSD schema definitions of Soap Messages | Message Contracts primarily target the <soap:Header> and <soap:Body> construction |
| Data Contracts can control only the contents of Soap message data. Just the types between the <soap:Body> section | Message Contracts can control the whole SOAP message |
| Data Contracts are mostly used while dealing with serialized types within the message body | Message Contracts are mostly used while passing security information as tokens, correlation guids into the soap headers |
| Data contracts take care of the Data Structures of the message e.g. defining complex types, collections, etc | Message Contracts take care of the overall message structure of the WSDL |
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