Lately I've been researching Microsoft AppFabric Caching services as a way to manage session over an ASP.NET web farm. There are other options out there for handling shared session across load balanced web servers, but this is perhaps the newest one I've seen. By new, I mean it was officially launched on June 7th, 2010. AppFabric Caching grew up (in beta) under the name Velocity and has material on their old/dead blog dating back to June of 2008, so at least the concept has been around a while. At any rate, I was turned onto this technology by a coworker (our DBA in fact) and I've been able to spend a few cycles looking into it.
For anyone starting to look into this product here are a few links that may help.
- The main AppFabric product page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/ee695849.aspx
- Another “Main” page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/app-main.aspx
- AppFabric Installation Word Doc: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184618
- Managing Security for client access: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921012.aspx
- Configuring ASP.NET: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee790859.aspx
- AppFabric on Twitter: http://twitter.com/appfabric
- AppFabric Web Farm Guide: http://bit.ly/9u1vum
