In this chapter we've introduced you to Microsoft Transaction Server, and used a simple component and ASP script to demonstrate it in action. At first, MTS seems a complex concept to grasp, but much of it operates transparently behind the scenes. We will, however, uncover some more of the details in later chapters.
MTS is a service running under Windows NT Server that caches, allocates, activates and deactivates instances of components that are used by your applications. This can improve response times and maximize resource availability, providing superior performance to distributed applications—particularly when they are built along the DNA guidelines. In this respect, it is comparable to what are often referred to as Object Request Broker (ORB) services available on other platforms.
But MTS can do more than this. It provides the services of a Transaction Processor as well, allowing components to be linked into transactions that must all succeed or all be rolled back. This feature makes building reliable and robust data management applications much simpler, especially in distributed applications where the data may reside on several different and remote servers.
So, in this chapter, we've seen:
We move on in the next chapter to resume the story of the Wrox Car Co sample application. We'll adapt the components you saw in the previous chapter to use transactions, and look at how we go about designing and building an application that uses them.