If you have had a chance to install Beta 1 of .NET V2 (i.e. Whidbey), you may have noticed a new namespace called System.Transactions. System.Transactions provides a simple object model that unifies the concept of a transaction into a number of basic building blocks that caters for more possibilities when using transactions, brings the transaction paradigm to new and innovative scenarios, as well as simplifying how transactions can be used, while providing more agility, performance and scalability.

Within System.Transaction you will find new innovative ways of handling transactions in a declarative ([Transaction]) , implicit (Transaction.Current, TransactionScope) and explicit/manual (ITransaction) way. The simplification and unification of how transactions are performed in Whidbey provides a whole host of new possibilities and provides an environment where the effort involved in ensuring concurrency management and recovery control is “pay as you go”.

As well as providing a unified programming model for transactions in .NET, System.Transactions provides a whole new set of features that provides greater performance and agility. These include:

• A Lightweight Transaction Manager (LTM), for transactions within an AppDomain.
• Implicit Transactions, so that code blocks can be scoped using TransactionScope
• resource manager are easy to create and allow you to create new possibilities as to what can partake in a transaction
• Transaction promotion from lightweight transaction to distributed transactions.
• An ambient transaction context, Transaction.Current
• PSPE (Promotable Single Phase Enlistment) – which is the delegation of responsibility of a transactions outcome to the one durable resource manager that is currently enlisted in a transaction scope.  The durable resource manager must support PSPE for this to occur.
• and of course there is transaction agility.
• all lots more cool stuff !

So over the next week or so, I will walk though some of these features ………