My Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 tutorial series has been updated with four new tutorials on caching data. Caching is a technique that has long been used by computer scientists to improve an application's performance. ASP.NET 1.x introduced a powerful caching API that ASP.NET 2.0 has built upon. These four new tutorials on caching data are:
- Caching Data with the ObjectDataSource [VB | C#] - explores key concepts of caching and looks at how to declaratively cache data using the ObjectDataSource.
- Caching Data in the Architecture [VB | C#] - examines adding caching support to the application architecture by creating a separate Caching Layer (in addition to the Business Logic Layer and Data Access Layer).
- Caching Data at Application Startup [VB | C#] - for static data or expensive queries whose underlying data seldom changes, it may be optimal to cache this data at application startup. This topic is explored in detail in this tutorial.
- Using SQL Cache Dependencies [VB | C#] - one challenge of caching is data staleness. Since the cache is just a copy of the underlying data, if the underlying data changes, the cached content is no longer valid. Ideally, cached data will immediately be evicted from the cache once the underlying database data has been modified. This is possible with little effort thanks to ASP.NET 2.0's SQL Cache Dependencies. This tutorial looks at different ways to implement SQL Cache Dependencies and steps through using the polling method (which works with all versions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000).
Like the previous tutorials in the series, all tutorials are available in C# and VB, include the complete code download as a self-extracting ZIP, and are available in PDF format.
Happy Programming!