On Transactional NTFS and the future

If you have been doing system-level development on the Windows platform, you might be aware of a feature called Transactional NTFS, or TxF for short. This feature allows you to perform atomic file-level operations on an NTFS formatted disk, such as making sure that data written to two individual files either succeeds for both files, or fails for both. This greatly improves data integrity.

This great feature was introduced in Windows Vista (one of my favorite new features on that version, part of the Kernel Transaction Manager or KTM), but while browsing on MSDN documentation for other topics, I sadly noticed that TxF will possibly be removed from future Windows versions.

Although TxF usage hasn't been high, there are many business applications that would be much worse off without it. So, if you are currently using this feature in your application, be prepared for chances, but at the same time, remember to make noise that you are using the feature.

Let's keep our thumbs up for TxF, it's a great feature in Windows the platform!