distilled

To date, the tooling available to enable and configure interoperable WS-AtomicTransaction in Windows Communication Foundation and MSDTC has been less than ideal with a number of issues that have been detailed in previous release notes.

With the upcoming WinFX CTP, this should get a whole lot better with two significantly redesigned pieces.

Firstly the Microsoft Management Console plugin that appears next to the DTC pane has been entirely redesigned.

We have reorganized the UI into clear sections for network configuration and security, transaction timeouts and a sub-dialog for controlling the granularity and types of traces and control over the session that will capture these events. Screen grabs from a recent build follow:

With the exception of the trace session control, the configuration will work locally or remotely.

This UI component (WsatUI.dll) is included in the Windows SDK with the rest of the WinFX SDK tools. It is not installed into the MMC by default so you do need to register it as follows:

        regasm /codebase WsatUI.dll

There is a similar set of capabilities at the command-line. I will point out that this does not include that logging session control since that is already covered by the existing platform tool LogMan.exe and we have moved away from requiring base64 hashes to identify certs to the much more standard thumbprints. Other than that hopefully configuration should be fairly clear when coupled with the tool documentation. Anyway, The new syntax is as follows:

Microsoft (R) WS-AtomicTransaction Configuration Utility
[Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 3.0.4024.0]
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Utility to configure WS-AtomicTransaction network support

 -- OPTIONS --

-network:{enable|disable}         Enables or disables the WS-AtomicTransaction
                                  network support
-port:<portNum>                   Sets the HTTPS port for WS-AtomicTransaction
-endpointCert:{machine|<thumb>|   Uses the machine certificate or another
         "Issuer\SubjectName"}    local endpoint certificate specified by
                                  thumbprint or Issuer\SubjectName pair. Use
                                  {EMPTY} for the subject name if it's empty.
-accounts:<account,>              Specifies the comma-separated list of accounts
                                  that can participate
-accountsCerts:{<thumb>|          Specifies the comma-separated list of thumbprint
         "Issuer\SubjectName",}   or Issuer\SubjectName identifiers for the
                                  certificates that can participate. Use {EMPTY}
                                  for the subject name if it's empty.
-timeout:<sec>                    Specifies the default timeout in seconds
-maxTimeout:<sec>                 Specifies the maximum timeout in seconds
-traceLevel:{Off|Error|Critical|  Sets the trace level
            Warning|Information|
            Verbose|All}
-traceActivity:{enable|disable}   Enables or disables the tracing of activity
              events
-traceProp:{enable|disable}       Enables or disables the tracing of propagation
              events
-tracePII:{enable|disable}        Enables or disables the tracing of personally
                                  identifiable information
-show                             Shows the current WS-AtomicTransaction
                                  protocol settings
-restart                          Restarts MSDTC to make changes active
                                  immediately. If not specified, the changes
                                  will take effect when MSDTC is next started.