What's a Transaction?

What is a transaction? Broadly speaking, a transaction is a mechanism to ensure that several operations succeed or fail as an atomic unit. In other words, it ensures that all operations succeed or all operations fail in the event that even one of the constituent components of the transaction encounters an error. Broadly speaking, transactions enforce the ACID rule popularized in database programming. WCF provides a simple centralized manner to support transactions within your applications. Prior to WCF, although there were mechanisms to support transactions (Begin Transaction...End Transaction in Visual Basic, for example), a single standard means of being able to support nondatabase transactions was not a trivial task ...

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