<p>I am working on a new project. Is there any benefit with going with a WCF web service over a regular old fashion web service?</p>

<p>Visual Studio offers templates for both. What are the differences? Pros and cons?</p>

The Pros of doing all by yourself is:
No learning curve
Very flexible
The Pros of WCF are:
Costs less time in the longer run
Switch protocols without programming
A disadvantage of WCF: some static property names
can be pretty lengthy
...
To summarize: WCF lets you focus on programming, but you need to learn it first ;-)