Chapter 19 -- Creating Transactional ASP Web Pages

Chapter 19

In this chapter, we'll look at how you can create transactional applications using Active Server Pages (ASP). Therefore, in addition to Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0, we'll be looking at Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) 2.0 and how the two can be leveraged to create transactional, browser-based applications. MTS 2.0 must be installed and the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) service must be running for your transactional ASP Web pages to work. You can run MTS 2.0 either with IIS 4.0 or with Personal Web Server (PWS) 4.0, although IIS 4.0 is the recommended approach. It's worth noting that transactional ASP is just one way that you can write a transactional client-side application. Of course, you can also write transactional applications by using Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual C++, or Microsoft Visual J++ for your client-side presentation layer.

As we learned in Chapter 17, one nice thing about Microsoft technology is that it gives you a number of options. For example, you can leverage the same server-side components in MTS by calling them both from Visual Basic clients and from a browser-based client using ASP. You might do this in a situation where you want to make the MTS components available to both Web-based users (perhaps mobile workers) and LAN-based users.

Before you begin dealing with transactions, it's worthwhile to review some of the basic theory surrounding Microsoft Transaction Server. Specifically, you need to know the definitions of the following:

• A transaction
• Transaction attributes
• MTS packages and components
• The context object

This knowledge will prove useful not only for the work that we perform in this chapter but also for the subsequent chapter, which covers creating transactional components with Visual Basic 6.0. Once you've learned the basics about transactions and MTS, you'll be well equipped to start writing transactional applications—either two-tiered or n-tiered.