The document discusses Microsoft's AppFabric distributed caching platform. It provides an overview of AppFabric and why distributed caching is useful, how to configure AppFabric clients and servers, and how to manage a cache cluster. The presentation also addresses caching data types, concurrency handling, and high availability.

2. The Need For Speed
A Developer’s Guide to
Distributed Caching with
Velocity Windows Server AppFabric
Phil Pursglove
@philpursglove
http://philpursglove.blogspot.com

3. Agenda
• What is AppFabric?
• Why a Distributed Cache?
• Configuring a client
• Configuring a server
• Managing a cache
• Concurrency
• High availability / load balancing

4. Caching Review
• .NET 1.1
– ASP.NET Cache
• .NET 2.0
– SqlCacheDependency
– Enterprise Library Caching Application Block
• .NET 4.0
– System.Runtime.Caching assembly
– AppFabric

5. What is AppFabric?
• A combination of two projects:
– A distributed cache
• One logical cache shared across a number of physical servers
• Already being used by:
– MSDN Forums. Xbox Live, MSN
• An ASP.NET session state provider
• In .NET 4.0, a cache provider
– A workflow host
• V1 released to web 4th June
– Servers must be .NET 4.0, clients can be .NET 3.5/4.0

6. Why a Distributed Cache?
• Bigger cache
– Many physical servers contribute to one
logical cache
• Increased throughput
– Many servers available to fulfil requests
• High availability
– Multiple servers = fault tolerance

7. What Data Can I Cache In
AppFabric?
• Any serializable .NET object
– Reference Data (Shared Read)
• e.g. Product categories
– Activity Data (Exclusive Write)
• e.g. Shopping Basket
– Resource Data (Read and Write)
• e.g. product stock data

8. Configuring the AppFabric Client
• Two assembly references to add:
– Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Client.dll
– Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Core.dll
• Cache hosts can be hard-coded or in
web.config/app.config
• Clients
– Routing vs Simple
– Local caches

9. Using AppFabric
• Add/Remove
• Concurrency
– Optimistic
• Version-based
– Pessimistic
• Lock-based
• Tags
• Regions
– Live inside a cache
– Use for a set of logically related cached items e.g. Products
– Tie a group of cached objects to a specific node 

10. Configuring an AppFabric Server
• Cluster configuration can be held:
– On a network share (XML Provider)
– In a SQL Server DB (SQL Provider)
• Integrated Security only 
– AppFabric servers must be inside a domain

11. Managing An AppFabric
Cluster
• Powershell integration
– Can start/stop a whole cluster or individual
servers
– Create new named caches
• But not regions 
– Get cache statistics
• MDCAdmin tool
– WPF app sitting on top of Powershell

12. Summary
• AppFabric brings the cloud inside your
organisation!
• Distributed caching is a powerful way to
bring scalability to your applications
– Throughput
– High availability

13. Questions?
@philpursglove
http://philpursglove.blogspot.com
http://www.philippursglove.com/Velocity

14. References
• V1 Download
– http://tinyurl.com/appfabricdownload
• Documentation on MSDN
– http://tinyurl.com/msdnappfabric
• Velocity team blog
– http://blogs.msdn.com/velocity
– http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint
• AppFabric blog for IT Pros
– http://blogs.technet.com/appfabric/
• TechEd videos
– http://tinyurl.com/velocityteched
• Mix 09 video
– http://tinyurl.com/velocitymixvideo
• Mix 10 video
– http://tinyurl.com/velocitymix10video
• ARCCast Video
– http://tinyurl.com/velocityscotthavideo
• ScottHa on Velocity
– http://tinyurl.com/velocityhanselminutes
• Deep Fried Bytes on AppFabric
– http://tinyurl.com/deepfriedappfabric

15. References
• AppFabric coverage on StackOverflow
– http://tinyurl.com/stackoverflowvelocity
– http://tinyurl.com/stackoverflowappfabric
• DotNetRocks
– http://tinyurl.com/dotnetrocksappfabric
• Other .NET distributed caches
– NCache - http://tinyurl.com/ncache
– Memcached - http://tinyurl.com/smoe
– Oracle Coherence – http://tinyurl.com/oraclecoherence
– SharedCache – http://codeplex.com/sharedcache
• Extensions Project
– http://tinyurl.com/mscacheext
• Admin Tool
– http://mdcadmintool.codeplex.com/