Are you handing more than one SQL database in Azure for your application ? Most of the times the answer would be YES. In dedicated database multi-tenant systems at least you have your customer information in the master database and dedicated application database for each customers. Some CRUD operations need to touch both the master and customer specific databases.

We need MSDTC (Microsoft Distributed Transaction Controller) for distributed transactions in on premise systems, but in Azure the SQL Databases has the elastic distributed transaction feature enabled and using .NET 4.6.1 we can use them via TransactionScope class from Systems.Transactions.

This link explains how this works, but I wanted to test this with EF and Azure App service as the Azure App service has the target platform option .NET 4.6 and not 4.6.1.

I created two logical Azure SQL servers in two different regions, and enabled the transaction communication link between them using PowerShell.

Then I created a small Web API project using .NET 4.6.2 (which is higher than the required version) and tested the app from the local machine and things worked well. I deployed the same stuff and things worked fine in Azure as well.

Even the though the target platform is .NET 4.6 in the Azure App Service, when we deploy the .NET 4.6.1 and .NET 4.6.2 projects, the required assemblies in the respected platform version are referenced.

But my swagger endpoint behaved strange and didn’t output the results, no idea why and need to launch another investigation for that.

You can reference the test project from my Github

Conclusion – We can use the Distributed transactions in Azure SQL Database using EF and deploy your projects written in .NET 4.6.1/ 4.6.2 in the Azure App Service platform targeting .NET 4.6