What is MTS?
Microsoft Transaction Server is:

- A General purpose infrastructure for multitier applications. It makes developing the middle tier easy.
- It manages objects, thread pools, connections and security.

Benefits of MTS
- Transaction support: It provides much of the infrastructure to automatically support transactions for components.
- A simple concurrency model: it manages simultaneous calls for hosted objects.
- Fault tolerance and isolation: "failfast" policy, if unhandled exceptions ocurr MTS terminates the component process without terminating the clients'.
- Resource Management: it maximizes resources by using techniques such as thread management, just-in-time object activation and resource pooling.
- Security: the developer can define role based permissions to invoke components.
- Distributed computing support: it can track components that may reside on different computers and manages transactions for them.
- Business object platform: makes it easy to develop and deploy middle-tier business objects.

MTS System requirements
- You can install MTS on your computer by using the Windows NT® 4.0 Option Pack.
- MTS runs on Windows NT, Windows® 98, and Windows® 95 with DCOM support.

MTS Configuration
After you install MTS, configure your MTS server so that you can deploy and manage MTS packages using the MTS Explorer. Set your MTS server up for deployment by doing the following:
- Configuring roles and package identity on the System package
- Setting up computers to administer
You must map the System package Administrator role to the appropriate user in order to safely deploy and manage MTS packages. When MTS is installed, the System package does not have any users mapped to the administrator role. Therefore, security on the System package is disabled, and any user can use the MTS Explorer to modify package configuration on that computer. This would be acceptable in a development environment. If you map users to System package roles, MTS will check roles when a user attempts to modify packages in the MTS Explorer.
By default, the System Package has an Administrator role and a Reader role. Users mapped to the Administrator role of the System package can use any MTS Explorer function. Users that are mapped to the Reader role can view all objects in the MTS Explorer hierarchy but cannot install, create, change, or delete any objects, shut down server processes, or export packages. For example, if you map your Windows NT domain user name to the System Package Administrator role, you will be able to add, modify, or delete any package in the MTS Explorer.

Requirements for MTS components:
- must be implemented as in-process dynamically linked libraries (DLLs). Components that are implemented as executable files (.exe files) cannot execute in the MTS run-time environment.
- should follow proper COM conventions including a standard class factory, a complete type library, and should use standard marshaling. COM components developed with VFP meet these requirements.
- should be designed as single threaded or apartment threaded (multi). Apartment-threaded components are more scalable than single-threaded ones.
- should be State Less; they should not maintain local data between client calls. State Less objects are more scalable than State Ful ones.

RESOURCES
How MTS Changes the COM Programming Model
http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0198/mtscom/mtscom.htm

Microsoft Transaction Server for Visual FoxPro Developers
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/MTSVFP.htm

Using Microsoft Transaction Server With VFP, by Rick Strahl
http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/mts/mts.htm

Building Components with Visual FoxPro 6.0
http://www.appdev.com/newstuff/default.asp?NewPage=foxnewstuff.htm

Book: Designing Component Based Applications by Mary Kirtland
http://mspress.microsoft.com/books/2408.htm

Microsoft Transaction Server Home Page
http://www.microsoft.com/com/tech/mts.asp

Microsoft Transaction Server Helps You Write Scalable, Distributed Internet Apps
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period97/periodic/msj/mts897.htm

Seminar: COM with Microsoft Transaction Server
http://msdn.microsoft.com/training/seminars/MSDN_4_100K/HTML/default.htm

Microsoft Transaction Server and Internet Information Server: Technology for the Web
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/backgrnd/html/msdn_mtsiis.htm

Setting up Microsoft Transaction Server
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/psdk/mts20sp1/settingup_9b1s.htm

A Guide to Reviewing and Evaluating Microsoft Transaction Server
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/backgrnd/html/msdn_mtsrevgd.htm

Microsoft Transaction Server: A General purpose infrastructure for multitier applications
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/backgrnd/html/msdn_mtswp.htm

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Contributors: JCrescencio Flores

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Category Exam 70-155 Hot Topic Category MTS Category 3 Star Topics Category C _ O _ M