Programming WCF Services

Transaction Protocols and Managers

Depending on the execution scope of the participating parties in the transaction, WCF will use a different transaction management protocol. The word protocol may be misleading here, because in the abstract the protocol being used is the two-phase commit protocol. The differences between the transaction management protocols have to do with the type of remote calls and communication protocol used and the kind of boundaries it can cross.

Lightweight protocol

This protocol is used to manage transactions in a local context only, inside the same app domain. It cannot propagate the transaction across the app domain boundary (let alone the process or machine boundary), nor can it flow the transaction across any service boundary (that is, from a client to a service). The lightweight protocol is used only inside a service or outside services. The Lightweight protocol yields the best performance compared with the other protocols.

OleTx protocol

This protocol is used to propagate transactions across app domain, process, and machine boundaries, and to manage the two-phase commit protocol. The protocol uses RPC calls, and the exact binary format of the calls is Windows-specific. As a result of the use of both the RPC and the Windows-specific format, it cannot go across firewalls or interoperate with non-Windows parties. This is usually not a problem because the primary use for the OleTx protocol is for managing transactions in an intranet, in a homogenous ...