I’ve been working on the business and data layers for a web system and, as you might expect, I’ve been making quite a bit of use of ASP.NET’s caching system. Now, to test the business layer, I had gone ahead and set up a non-ASP.NET caching system as well using my standard method for caching in Windows applications, a static hashtable with strongly typed string keys (works well, fairly compatible with the ASP.NET cache so it is easy to move code between the two models) but then I realized that I could just use the ASP.NET cache even when my code was being used from a Windows Forms applications (for my class libraries, where I don’t know what type of interface is being used) and it works just fine.

Shared Function GetValueFromCache( _ ByVal key As String) As Object Dim myContext As HttpContext myContext = HttpContext.Current

  If myContext Is Nothing Then        Return HttpRuntime.Cache.Get(key)    Else        Return myContext.Cache.Get(key)    End IfEnd Function

Shared Sub PlaceValueIntoCache( _ ByVal key As String, _ ByVal item As Object, _ ByVal cacheDuration As Integer) Dim myContext As HttpContext myContext = HttpContext.Current Dim myCache As Caching.Cache

  If myContext Is Nothing Then        myCache = HttpRuntime.Cache    Else        myCache = myContext.Cache    End If



  myCache.Insert(key, item, Nothing, _    Now.AddSeconds(cacheDuration), _    Caching.Cache.NoSlidingExpiration)End Sub

This might be common knowledge, but I have been handling my own non-ASP.NET caching all on my own, and this just makes it too easy. In fact, it makes it so easy that I started thinking of ways to perform even more caching in some of my Windows Forms applications… I can see many performance gains in my future!