Simon Harriyott

Starting the Distributed Transaction Coordinator from C#

The DTC is needed when a Winforms app is calling more than one stored procedure as part of a transaction. As the DTC is just a service, the standard ServiceController class can be used. A reference to System.ServiceProcess must be added first, and the code is as follows:

// Find the Distributed Transaction Controller service
ServiceController service = new ServiceController("MSDTC");
if (service.Status != ServiceControllerStatus.Running)
{
    try
    {
        service.Start();
        // Wait for up to 10 seconds for the service to start
        TimeSpan timeSpan = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10);
        service.WaitForStatus(ServiceControllerStatus.Running, timeSpan);
    }
    catch (TimeoutException exc)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(exc.Message);
    }
}