Chapter 7. Contexts

In the summer of 1996, my MSDN supplement came to my office as it always did—via UPS in a little brown box. I opened the box, and there was a little red CD-ROM labeled Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) 1.0.

I, along with my peers, had heard about MTS (code named Viper). We knew it would somehow, magically, enable COM objects to share in transactions, but we weren't sure what that meant. The basic idea was that a number of related objects could manipulate a database, but if any one of the objects encountered a problem it could shout "Abort!" Then the database modifications for all the objects would be undone. But how could this be?