"The transaction associated with the current connection has completed but has not been disposed." Well, not really

I was trying to solve another problem, that operations creating, altering or dropping databases cannot be made inside a .Net transaction. Therefore I created a new TransactionScope inside the main one, using the TransactionScopeOption.Suppress option, but then I started getting this weird exception: The transaction associated with the current connection has completed but has not been disposed. The transaction must be disposed before the connection can be used to execute SQL statements. But I did Complete and Dispose all my transaction scopes, so what was going on? Long story short, this is really confusing message for a simple problem: your transaction probably timed out. Create the transaction scope with a large TimeSpan as the Timeout and it will get through. If you can, you can use a try/catch/finally block in which you Dispose the transaction (just remember that a using construct is basically a try/finally block). In my case, I was conditionally creating this new TransactionScope, so I wasn't using using. The transaction would fail, bleed into the other transaction where the confusing exception was being thrown.