I have a data file and from time to time I need to write a change to the file. The change consists of changing information in more than one place. For example, changing some data near the end of the file and also changing some information near the start. I want the two separate writes to either both succeed or both fail, otherwise it is left in uncertain state and effectively corrupted. Is there any builtin support for this scenario in .NET or in general?
If not then how to others solve this issue? How does a database on Windows solve this issue?
UPDATE: I do not want to use the Transactional NTFS capability because it is not available on older version of Windows such as XP and it is slow in the file overwrite scenario as described above.
If you are using Windows 6 or later (Vista/7/2008/2008R2) the NTFS filesystem supports transactions (including within a distributed transaction): but you will need to use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs (see this question).
If you need to run on older versions of Windows, or non-NTFS partitions you would need to perform the transactions yourself. This is decidedly non-trivial: getting full ACID functionality while handling multiple processes (including remote access via shares) across process and system crashes even with the assumption that only your access methods will be used (some other process using normal Win32 APIs would of course break things).
In this case a database will almost certainly be easier: there are a number of in-process databases (SQL Compact Edition, SQL Lite, …) so a database doesn’t require a server process.