.NET 4 Caching Support

Question

I understand the .NET 4 Framework has caching support built into it. Does anyone have any experience with this, or could provide good resources to learn more about this?

Answer 1

I've not made use of it myself, but if you're just caching simple objects in memory, you're probably referring to the MemoryCache class, in the System.Runtime.Caching namespace. There is a little example of how to use it at the end of the page.

Edit: To make it look like I've actually done some work for this answer, here's the sample from that page! :)

private void btnGet_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    ObjectCache cache = MemoryCache.Default;
    string fileContents = cache["filecontents"] as string;

    if (fileContents == null)
    {
        CacheItemPolicy policy = new CacheItemPolicy();

        List filePaths = new List();
        filePaths.Add("c:\\cache\\example.txt");

        policy.ChangeMonitors.Add(new 
        HostFileChangeMonitor(filePaths));

        // Fetch the file contents.
        fileContents = 
            File.ReadAllText("c:\\cache\\example.txt");

        cache.Set("filecontents", fileContents, policy);
    }

    Label1.Text = fileContents;
}

It's interesting because it shows that you can apply dependencies to the cache, much like in the classic ASP.NET cache. The big difference here is that you don't have a dependency on the System.Web assembly.