Finally have a few minutes to play with Velocity, Microsoft’s new distributed cache offering that’s currently in CTP1 status (since a month ago at TechEd Developers in Orlando). Read the official announcement here. The installation immediately asks you to configure your machine as a Cache Host:

To proceed, create a shared folder that grants Everyone Read and Write permissions (per the README this will be addressed in a future release).

When complete:

Note that the Cluster Name must be a single word, no spaces or special characters.

YES!

Now that that’s over with, we can start doing stuff with the cache using its console-style Administration Tool. Here are a few quick commands that get our cache service up and running and confirm that it at least appears to be functional, albeit thus far nothing is using it.

The next post on this topic will show how to actually program against Velocity. It looks like there are some good How To articles in the included Help file:

ScottW also has a Velocity setup writeup that until just now I hadn’t had a chance to read over. Mine’s likely to be very similar, now that I read his, but we’ll see if I can’t stretch it a bit further.