Summary

This chapter has introduced you to the concept of transaction processing and how it is supported in Microsoft Transaction Server. As you come away from this chapter, the key points that you should remember are:

Transaction processing consists of applications composed of components, which are designed as single-user objects. These components are scalable to large numbers of users, with the system ensuring application integrity.
Transaction processing provides support for the multi-tier application model. This model makes it easy to build distributed applications. The system ensures that transactions are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable.
Microsoft Transaction Server provides transaction processing services, consisting of a run-time environment, graphical user interface for management, and an application programming interface.
The integration of Microsoft Transaction Server and Internet Information Server provide for services such as transactional Active Server Pages, crash protection for IIS applications, transactional events, object context for IIS objects, and common installation and management
Issues relating to the design of transactional components included holding state in components, threading model selection, object scope, and tools for creating components
Finally, as case study of a financial funds transfer application that shows how powerful transactional programming can be very easy to program, given the power of MTS.

Now that we have introduced the concept of transactional processing, the next few chapters will be spent covering a detailed case study. This case study will use many of the concepts that were covered in this chapter, and will introduce a number of new concepts as well.