Transactions Sessions at PDC 2005

If you are at PDC this year, don't forget to attend the sessions related to transactions. An easy way to find these sessions is to go to https://commnet1.microsoftpdc.com/content/sessions.aspx and search by Keyword="transaction".

I especially recommend the session called "FUN320 - Windows Vista & "Longhorn" Server: Improving Reliability Using System.Transactions and the Transactional NTFS and Registry". Jim Johnson, our architect for transactions is presenting this session together with Dana Groff, the program manager in Core File Services focusing on transaction technologies.

Here is the full list:

FUN320 Windows Vista & "Longhorn" Server: Improving Reliability Using System.Transactions and the Transactional NTFS and Registry

Day/Time: Thursday, September 15 5:15 PM- 6:30 PM Room: 406 AB

Speaker(s): Dana Groff, Jim Johnson

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 300

Track(s): Fundamentals

You can build significantly more reliable applications by using the expanded and enhanced classes in the System.Transactions namespace. This session covers how to use new transaction-oriented programming techniques for application stability and robustness. Learn about the new systems in Windows Vista and "Longhorn" Server for supporting Transacted Files (TxF) and Transacted Registry (TxR) operations in both native and managed code.

FUN323 Microsoft Research: Future Possibilities in Concurrency

Day/Time: Friday, September 16 8:30 AM- 9:45 AM Room: 406 AB

Speaker(s): Tim Harris

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 300

Track(s): Fundamentals

Learn about the investment Microsoft Research is making in future languages and tools to help write software that will gain the maximum benefit from tomorrow's multi-processor/multi-core hardware. In this session, we start by introducing some of the tools and techniques we've developed for tracking down and preventing bugs in multi-threaded software. We then turn to the language features that we're prototyping in research: our work on transactional memory is developing a programming model where data can be shared directly between threads without needing to worry about locking or low-level deadlocks; our work on synchronization is leading to a unified abstraction for co-ordination between threads and between processes. We'll demo some of our prototype systems, showing how these techniques can lead to software which is not only easier to develop, but which can scale from uniprocessors up to highly parallel systems.

Distributed Atomic Transactions - Wishful Thinking?

Day/Time: Tuesday, September 13 9:00 PM- 10:00 PM Room: 511 C

Session Type(s): Birds of a Feather

Session Level(s): 300

Web Services, via SOAP, is the preferred choice of doing wide-reaching distributed communications today. However, one of the few factors that has hindered its adoption in the enterprise today is its lack of ability to handle transactions between remote un-trusted (independent) boundaries. There are two schools of thought today with regards to transactions --- The Atomic Way or The Compensating Way which pretty much takes out the atomicity of ACID. Indigo supports WS-AT via Microsoft DTC. Will this be widely adopted in the enterprise collaboration space? Or are we living in Fool's Paradise?

COM307 Windows Communications Foundation ("Indigo"): Writing Reliable and Transacted Distributed Applications

Day/Time: Wednesday, September 14 3:15 PM- 4:30 PM Room: 403 AB

Speaker(s): Shy Cohen

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 300

Track(s): Communications

What do you do when your network connection breaks half-way through a request? How do you synchronize state changes across different Web services? How do you overcome a system crash without losing important messages? Windows Communications Foundation (formerly codename "Indigo") provides simple and powerful reliability mechanisms that allow you to easily address these types of network and application issues. Take an in-depth look at reliable sessions, queues, and distributed transactions, and how these technologies are used to achieve reliable, transacted communication.

COM202 Windows Communications Foundation ("Indigo"): A Lap around the Windows Communications Foundation

Day/Time: Tuesday, September 13 1:00 PM- 2:15 PM Room: Halls C & D (Petree Hall)

Speaker(s): Omri Gazitt

Session Type(s): Breakout

Session Level(s): 200

Track(s): Communications

Windows Communications Foundation (formerly codename "Indigo") is Microsoft's new platform technology for building distributed applications, bringing the best of ASP.NET Web services, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, WSE, and System.Messaging into one unified framework. This session introduces the core concepts in the Windows Communications Foundation programming model-addresses, bindings, contracts, and behaviors-and presents the Windows Communications Foundation feature set through the lens of these concepts. This session covers security, reliable messaging, transactions, queues, hosting, transports, interop/integration, and more. If you have never seen an introduction to Windows Communication Framework, this session is for you.

The slides from these sessions are currently available at https://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/content/downloads.aspx