I usually do not post my unqualified ramblings on here but a thought occurred to me today regarding a problem I'm having with on of my mobile systems.  There is a great deal of data exchange and I have taken pains to ensure that no data is ever "lost" in the process.  If a network connection dies at the wrong time the worst thing that happens is that the data exchanged did not complete and the PDA OR server (never both) each have an incomplete picture of the data in question.  When this occurs, I recover the complete picture from a transaction log and go on with my life.

However, I was thinking that it would sure be great to be able to treat the whole data synchronization process as one great big distrubuted transaction.  A distributed transaction involved a wifi network, an over-the-air CDMA connection, web services and SQL server.  There are a hundred sticky little issues that would go along with that strategy and at least a hundred very good reasons not to pursue the idea but it certainly has some allure in my mind as well.  The way my data sync is set up, unfortunately, the transaction cannot be just on the server nor just on the client, they must both agree to commit or roll back if the agreement cannot be procured in a reasonable amount of time; it would be much easier if I could just "make sure the handheld was done", etc.

If anyone out there has mused before on distrubuted transactions involving compact framwork applications I'd be very interested in where your thoughts led.