As I sit through the last few hours of Juval Lowy’s Architects Master Class, drinking my Honest Tea, I see a great quote on the inside of the bottle. How appropriate.
“The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget about old ideas.”
— John Maynard Keynes
Despite its pitiful adoption in the developer community, I am implementing Transactional NTFS (TxF) transactions using the Microsoft.KtmIntegration.TransactedFile class. This allows me to reap the benefits of TransactionScope and distributed transactions for file operations (e.g. creates, updates, deletes). This is the only missing piece for typical transactional business applications. With the “KTM” and “KtmRm for Distributed Transactions” services, available only on Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008, file operations will roll back if the TransactionScope is not completed.
There’s just one problem. Transactional NTFS does not work with file shares. I can?t remember the last time I put a “C:FileStore” reference in a config file. A friendly share like \serverFileStore is always preferred, especially since DFS came about. Attempting to use a share results in the following error message:
The remote server or share does not support transacted file operations
Don’t read this as “your remote server” or “your remote share”, but rather “all remote servers and shares”. As mentioned in this MSDN article, TxF is not supported by the CIFS/SMB protocols. The error was probably written with the expectation that one day some remote servers and shares would support TxF. I emailed Microsoft about it and received a response fairly quickly. The response was simply:
“We understand the need and have plans to eventually support TxF over SMB2, but we?re not there yet and are not ready to announce if or when this will be supported. When it is the documentation will be updated.”
I’m not getting my hopes up, but Windows Server 2011 looks to be our only hope before .NET changes beyond recognition and TxF is a distant memory. Until then, I wrapped up all of my TxF code in a WCF service and install that service on the server with the FileStore folder.
MSDN article – When to Use Transactional NTFS
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365738(v=VS.85).aspx
TxF Sandbox – Sample Projects (including Microsoft.KtmIntegration.TransactedFile)