Windows Azure AppFabric Cache next steps

A very straightforward of using Windows Azure Appfabric is to store records from a SQL Azure table (or another source of course).

Get access to your data cache (assuming your config settings are fine, see previous post).

List lookUpItems= null;

DataCache myDataCache = CacheFactory.GetDefaultCache();
lookUpItems = myDataCache.Get("MyLookUpItems") as List;

if (lookUpItems != null) //there is something in cache obviously
{
lookUpItems.Add("got these lookups from myDataCache, don't pick me");
}
else //get my items from my datasource and save it in cache.
{
LookUpEntities myContext = new LookUpEntitites(); //EF
var lookupItems = from lookupitem in myContext.LookUpItems
select lookupitem.ID, lookupitem.Value;
lookUpItems = lookupItems.Tolist();

/* assuming my static table with lookupitems might chance only once a day or so.Therefore, set the expiration to 1 day. This means that after one day after setting the cache item, the cache will expire and will return null */
myDataCache.Add("myLookupItems", lookUpItems , TimeSpan.FromDays(1));
}

Easy to use and very effective. The more complex and timeconsuming your query to your datasource (wherever and whatever it is) the more your performance will benefit from this approach. But, still consider the price you have to pay! The natural attitude of developing for Azure is always: consider the costs of your approach and try to minimiza bandwidth and storage transactions.

Use local caching for speed
You can use local client caching to truely speed up lookups. Remember that changing local cache actually changes the items and changes the items in your comboboxes e.g.

Windows Azure Azure AppFabric Cache Introduction

Windows Azure now offers a caching service. It's a cloud scaled caching mechanism that helps you speed up your cloudapps. It does exactly what a cache is supposed to do: offer high-speed access (and high availability & scalability, it's cloud after all) to all your application data.

How to setup caching?

Click your Service Bus, Access Control & Caching tab on the left side of the Windows Azure portal. Click New Namespace from the toolbar and create the one you like and choose the appropriate size. See below.



After creation everything is arranged by the platform. Security, scalability, availability, access tokens etc.

After you created the Caching Namespace you are able to start using it. First of all add the correct references to the assemblies involved in Caching. You can find them in the Program Files\Windows Azure AppFabric SDK\V1.0\Assemblies\NET4.0\Cache folder. Select the Caching.Client and Caching.Core assemblies and voila. ASP.NET project also need the Microsoft.Web.DistributedCache assembly.

The easiest way to create access to your cache is to copy the configuration to you app.config (or web.config). Click the namespace of the cache in Azure Portal. Then click in the toolbar on View Client Configuration on copy the settings and paste them in your config file in visual studio. The settings look like this.



Create a consoleapp and copy code as below and voila, your scalable, highly available, cloudy cache is actually up and running!

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

using Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching;
using Microsoft.ApplicationServer;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Cache client configured by settings in application configuration file.
DataCacheFactory cacheFactory = new DataCacheFactory();
DataCache defaultCache = cacheFactory.GetDefaultCache();

// Add and retrieve a test object from the default cache.
defaultCache.Add("myuniquekey", "testobject");
string strObject = (string)defaultCache.Get("testkey");
}
}
}

What can you store in Cache? Actually everything as long as it's serializable.

Have fun with it and use the features of the Windows Azure platform!