I’m working on my caching presentation for Fall ASP.NET Connections and a few user group presentations. Those few who read my blog can enjoy some early looks at my research, which I’ll detail here for my own future reference (and yours!).

First of all I only recently found a great article on Query Notifications in ADO.NET 2.0 which goes into depth about how Query

Notifications work in SQL Server 2005. This architecture is used by the SqlCacheDependency in ASP.NET 2.0’s Cache when it is working with a SQL Server 2005 database (an alternate technique is used with SQL7/2000). It’s a great article and one I’m definitely going to reference in my updated slide deck.

However, even though the article was just updated in June 2005, it is out of date based on some recently published Changes For ASP.NET 2.0 from Whidbey Beta 2 to RTM. Specifically, the need for SqlCacheDependency.Start() to be called did not exist in Beta 2, but is a requirement in RTM. To quote:

If you are creating cache dependencies based on SQL Server 2005, you

must call the System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDependency.Start method to

initialize SQL Server 2005-based dependencies.

Another change that will affect my slides — no more Disk-based caching. According to the same document, disk-based caching was not meeting the team’s performance goals.

I’ll be speaking on my favorite topic of caching as well as on build management using NAnt (in one session) or MSBuild (and probably VSTS) (in a follow-up session) at ASP.NET Connections in Las Vegas. Hope to see you there.