Manually Rolling Back a TransactionScope

The standard way to manage exceptions in ASP.NET (and by extension, MVC) web applications is to use the System.Transactions.TransactionScope class. It contains some useful properties:

• Auto Transaction Start: As soon as you instantiate the TransactionScope instance, it starts the transaction.
• Database Level: By default, this affects all connections in and out of the database. This means you can use it even when you don’t have access to the connection instance.
• Disposable: TransactionScope implements IDisposable, meaning if you wrap it in a using statement, it automatically commits the transaction (or rolls back if an exception occurs).

But the question is, how do you manually force a transaction to roll back? For example, in your integration/functional tests, you may want to start a transaction in the setup method, and roll it back in the tear-down method.

Oddly, there is no Rollback method (although there is a Complete method to force commiting the transaction). The answer, oddly enough, is to manually invoke Dispose.

I confirmed by decompiling the .NET 4.5 source that calling Dispose rolls back the transaction.

In my situation, this came with quite a cost: in a simple functional test, the runtime tripled (from 15s with manual clean-up, to 45s with a transaction). So be weary, and make sure you pick the solution that works for you.