‘MSDTC unavailable for SQL Express Transactions’ or ‘Who took my MSDTC settings on Vista?’

Greeted this morning by the following error after starting my unit tests “MSDTC on server ‘LONDON\SQLEXPRESS’ is unavailable.”. Just moved development to a new Vista machine. Ok, that’s usually solved quickly by activating Network DTC Access (side note: System.Transactions promotes to MSDTC if it needs too).

On Win2003 and XP you opened up the Component Services, right-clicked Properties on the ‘My Computer’ node under Computer Services > Computers and opened the ‘MSDTC’ tab in the dialog. There you changed the security settings. On Vista (and Win2008 where we had similar troubles a week or so ago, and I had forgotten to ask exactly where and how our sysadmin fixed it) you have to run ‘dcomcnfg’ from the run prompt and if you take the above described path it looks like this:

Lot’s of blank space and no ‘Security Settings’. Ok, in Vista onward they moved the security settings to a new node. Expand the tree to see the ‘Local DTC’ node.

Properties on that look like this:

There you can switch to the Security tab and activate Network DTC access. Voila you’re done…

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9 Responses to “‘MSDTC unavailable for SQL Express Transactions’ or ‘Who took my MSDTC settings on Vista?’”


  1. 1 senkwe November 21, 2008 at 20:29

    Thanks for this post. Was exactly what I was looking for :)

  2. 2 Bruce Sinner November 22, 2008 at 13:04

    Thanks, helped me a lot.

  3. 3 Belhocine farouk February 2, 2009 at 10:44

    Excellent, it was my only problem in Vista.

  4. 4 Guest March 18, 2009 at 16:19

    This was great help. Thanks a lot!!

  5. 5 João Lourenço - Brazil March 9, 2010 at 12:39

    Thanks man… GREAT!!!

  6. 6 Onkar June 8, 2010 at 4:59

    Thanks… It proved helpful..
    thanks again.

  7. 7 mohammad abu hantash October 27, 2010 at 20:41

    thanks alot you help me on my windows service configuration (I got this exception after doing the steps its working fine )
    thanks alot

  8. 8 Tijana Vujanac April 15, 2011 at 13:02

    On my Security tab, ‘Network DTC Access’ wasn’t checked.

    I had problem with message similar to this one:

    MSDTC on server ‘\SQLEXPRESS’ is unavailable.

    Thanks, it works now :)

  9. 9 Aditya May 31, 2011 at 17:31

    Thanks a lot..Simply great. This was as life saver for me :)


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