I'm really happy to announce that our own forum, dedicated to transactions in Windows and .Net is now live at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=388&SiteID=1 The RSS feed for the forum is http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/rss.aspx?ForumID=388&Mode=0&SiteID=1 I hope...

Many people ask - do I need transactions? Why do I need them? When to use them? The answer is simple: use them all the time, unless you have a very good reason not to (for instance, don't use atomic transactions for "long running activities" between businesses). The default should always be yes. You...

If you are at PDC this year, don't forget to attend the sessions related to transactions. An easy way to find these sessions is to go to http://commnet1.microsoftpdc.com/content/sessions.aspx and search by Keyword="transaction". I especially recommend the session called "FUN320 - Windows Vista...

"Indigo" and "Avalon" Beta1 RC are available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B789BC8D-4F25-4823-B6AA-C5EDF432D0C1&displaylang=en . More info can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn and http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices .

Please don't hesitate to send me your suggestions or questions or topics you would like to be discussed in this blog. You can post a comment to this post or use http://blogs.msdn.com/florinlazar/contact.aspx to let me know. I'll prioritize the list and cover as much as I can.

You've found a bug in a Microsoft product, and you don't know where to report it? Use MSDN Product Feedback Center http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/default.aspx to submit it. You can collaborate with Microsoft developers, MVPs, and beta testers to identify problems and workarounds, and then...

Ambient transactions are defined as transactions that live in the current thread or object context that anybody interested can query for their existence and use them to do work as part of them. Their existence means that the user wants to do a series of actions in a transacted "all or nothing" way. They...

Service Pack 2 adds to Windows XP the same level of security as in Windows Server 2003 for XA transactions (transactions that are used with XA-compliant resource managers like Oracle, IBM DB/2 etc). See my previous post at http://blogs.msdn.com/florinlazar/archive/2003/12/04/41370.aspx for the more details...

The most used feature of System.EnterpriseServices or COM+ is the distributed transaction support. And the automatic transaction programming model in ES using attributes ([Transaction] and [AutoComplete]) is great and nice but (it is always a but!)... you need to inherit from ServicedComponent and the...

Compare the performance of native COM+ and .Net Enterprise Services components and read some guidelines on how to get your EnterpriseServices to run faster at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dncomser/html/entsvcperf.asp?frame=true

The preview (RC2) of Windows XP Service Pack 2 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/sp2preview.mspx The general info about it can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/productinfo/XPSP2/default.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol...

I've been talking for a while about MSDTC and transactions without explaining them. I know many of you reading this blog already know the terms, but some of the developers just entering the enterprise space don't know if they should care or not about these subjects. MSDTC is an acronym for Microsoft...

These are the newsgroups you should use when looking for answers related to COM+, Enterprise Services or MSDTC: microsoft.public.platformsdk.complus_mts and microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.component_services . For Indigo answers, use microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.indigo . [Update March...

MSDTC , COM+ or EnterpriseServices are allowing you to specify an isolation level for transactions so that you can increase concurrency to improve performance and scalability. But, the value you set for the isolation level is used by MSDTC only to pass it to the resource manager(s), more like a hint...

When you install Windows Server 2003, most of the services will be off by default, including MSDTC network access. If you are using COM+/Enterprise Services and [Transactions], you are most likely to hit errors when you want to go distributed: flow transactions to another computer, talk to a resource...

Yes, it is possible to specify a per-component application config when using a ServicedComponent with activation type set to Server Application. By default all Server Applications are sharing dllhost.exe.config located in %windir%\system32. But there are cases when you need to have different configs...