.net - TransactionScope: Has it gotten better?

Question

When TransactionScope first came out, I ran into some serious issues getting it to work between my dev machine (XP) and our database server (Windows Server 2003).

When I looked into it more, this appeared to be a tricky and widespread issue that had a chance of becoming a headache in production, so I decided not to handle transactions this way (even though I like the syntax a lot and I really wanted it to work).

Are these problems still out there or is this safe to use? Do you use this regularly now without issues?

Thanks a lot!

Note: It has been a long time now, but I think the issue had something to do with Distribute Transaction Coordinator. I fiddled with it for a long time and was never able to get it working.

Answer 1

Rick Strahl has a great post about transaction scope and LINQ to SQL here. Its context is more LINQ to SQL, but I think that there are some principles that apply which could help you solve your question.

EDIT: to more specifically answer your question, here's what Strahl has to say about TransactionScope:

Traditionally TransactionScope was a .NET wrapper around the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) but it’s functionality has expanded somewhat. One concern is that the DTC is rather expensive in terms of resource usage and it requires that the DTC service is actually running on the machine (yet another service which is especially bothersome on a client installation).

However, recent updates to TransactionScope and the SQL Server Client drivers make it possible to use TransactionScope class and the ease of use it provides without requiring DTC as long as you are running against a single database and with a single consistent connection string