TransactionScope Stumbling Block

I returned to work this morning after a week's holiday to discover that all was not well in the TransactionScope camp. A certain four letter word that I won't repeat here sprang immediately to mind.

Luckily, tests had highlighted the problem before this went live, but the setback is disappointing at best and for me it's personally infuriating as I was the person who suggested it and took the lead in its development.

I've not had chance to look in a great depth at what the team investigated during my absence, but there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. The articles Nicholas has linked to (articles 1, 2 and 3 for your convenience) certainly suggests a reason to the problems we are seeing, but they might not be the root cause of the particular problems that the tests highlighted.

I mocked up an application involving instantiating two SqlConnection objects enlisting in the same TransactionScope weeks ago, prior to even suggesting we implement the pattern fully, and saw no problems with it.

Could this problem be purely down to a long running transaction timing out?

In Nick's words: To be continued...