Chapter 10 Understanding Transactions

Overview

The previous chapters covered ways to access and modify data, but they barely mentioned transactions because transactions are so important they deserve their own chapter. This chapter explains what a transaction is and how you can use different types of transactions with your ADO.NET data access, starting with the simplest type, the implicit transaction.

You will find that this chapter quickly moves beyond ADO.NET to a new namespace called System.Transactions. That's right: the System.Transactions namespace is not part of ADO.NET. It was developed by the Enterprise Services team at Microsoft. We will cover this namespace in detail because it offers a consistent, flexible programming model that's simply too significant to overlook.