MSDTC Woes With NServiceBus And NHibernate

I’ve spent about 3 days trying to get something working that should’ve just worked.  I basically wanted some .NET code to use a distributed transaction to update some data in a database, and then publish a message on the service bus.  I want to do this in a distributed transaction because if something goes wrong, i want to roll back both transactions (the database change and the published message).  Normally, this should just work if you have MS DTC configured correctly.  On my machine, i enabled Network DTC Access, and allowed outbound transaction communication.  On the database server, Network DTC Access was already enabled and both outbound and inbound communication was allowed.

Now the thing is, i’d either expect DTC to fail outright or to just work.  But it shouldn’t fail in one situation, and work in another.  On my machine, it failed in the following situation (which i’ll further refer to as Situation A):

  1. open a transaction scope
  2. open an nhibernate session
  3. hit the db
  4. publish a message through nservicebus
  5. close the nhibernate session
  6. complete and close the transaction scope

Step 4 and 5 could be switched around but it didn’t make a difference.  In Situation A, i always got a TransactionManagerCommunicationException with the following message:

   Network access for Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled. Please enable DTC for network access in the security configuration for MSDTC using the Component Services Administrative tool.

Everyone who’s worked with MSDTC before probably knows that exception since it usually takes some fiddling with the settings to make things work.  The thing is, i was pretty sure that my settings, as well as the ones on the database server were correct.  Unfortunately, DTCPing didn’t confirm that since that too failed.

Read more: The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

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