Processing Transactions

When you purchase a book from an online bookstore, you exchange money (in the form of credit) for a book. If your credit is good, a series of related operations ensures that you get the book and the bookstore gets your money. However, if a single operation in the series fails during the exchange, the entire exchange fails. You do not get the book and the bookstore does not get your money.

The technology responsible for making the exchange balanced and predictable is called transaction processing. Transactions ensure that data-oriented resources are not permanently updated unless all operations within the transactional unit complete successfully. By combining a set of related operations into a unit that either completely succeeds or completely fails, you can simplify error recovery and make your application more reliable.

Transaction processing systems consist of computer hardware and software hosting a transaction-oriented application that performs the routine transactions necessary to conduct business. Examples include systems that manage sales order entry, airline reservations, payroll, employee records, manufacturing, and shipping.

This section provides both general information on transaction processing and specific information on how to process transactions in the Microsoft .NET Framework.

In This Section

• Transaction Processing Fundamentals
  Introduces basic transaction processing terms and concepts.
• Transaction Models
  Compares and contrasts two models for adding transactions to your .NET Framework application.

Related Sections

• Writing Serviced Components
  Describes the services available to managed components.
• Creating Messaging Components
  Explains the role of messaging in applications.
• Accessing Data with ADO.NET
  Provides specific details for using ADO.NET to access data.