ChrisDevBox

Since the creation and launch of Wikipedia back in 2001 many people from all over the world have been busy collaborating, adding and updating content on this very popular wiki web.

The wiki concept started a long time ago back in the early 1990’s, nevertheless, Wikipedia, even though it hasn’t been around too long, it is by far the biggest and most active wiki on the web.

The amount of valuable data that has been accumulating on Wikipedia is already in the millions. The biggest challenge now is making all of that data relevant and meaningful to users exploring and searching for information.

Most people arrive into Wikipedia via Google… for example, if you do a quick google search on pretty much anything you’ll most likely get Wikipedia at the very top of the search results. That’s due to Wikipedia’s huge link popularity and page ranking (Different topic).

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Microsoft has just released a new memcached-like application (Or service) which allows for distributed in-memory storage capabilities and can be used within any .NET Framework project (Console, ASP.NET, etc)

In their own words:

“Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. Using “Velocity,” applications can store any serializable CLR object without concern for where the object gets stored because data is cached across multiple computers. “Velocity” allows copies of data to be stored across the cache cluster, protecting data against failures. It can be configured to run as a service accessed over the network or can be run embedded with the distributed application. “Velocity” includes an ASP.NET session provider object enabling storage of ASP.NET session objects in the distributed cache without having to write to databases, which increases the performance and scalability of ASP.NET applications

In the past we’ve had to store data using their native wrappers, custom applications or even memcached with .NET wrappers, but they were all limited to one machine. Even their session state server was limited to one machine and for session data only. This type of innovation is a step forwards towards helping web architects scale their .NET applications.

Here is a link to download the package

And here is the MSDN link for support

I didn’t find a lot of code samples out there, so if you find any please post a comment share it with us.

Chris