Announcing CosmosDB Table Async OutputCache Provider Release and ASP.NET Providers Connected Service Extension Update

Through the years, ASP.NET team have been releasing new ASP.NET SessionState and OutputCache providers to help developers make their web applications ready for the cloud environment. Today we are announcing a new OutputCache provider, Microsoft.AspNet.OutputCache.CosmosDBTableAsyncOutputCacheProvider,  to enable your applications store the OutputCache data into CosmosDB. It supports both Azure CosmosDB Table and Azure Storage Table.

How to Use CosmosDBTableAsyncOutputCacheProvider

1. Open the NuGet package manager and search for Microsoft.AspNet.OutputCache.CosmosDBTableAsyncOutputCacheProvider and install. Make sure that your application is targeted to .NET Framework 4.6.2 or higher version. Download the .NET Framework 4.6.2 Developer Pack if you do not already have it installed.
2. The package has dependency on Microsoft.AspNet.OutputCache.OutputCacheModuleAsync Nuget package and Microsoft.Azure.CosmosDB.Table Nuget package. After you install the package, both Microsoft.AspNet.OutputCache.CosmosDBTableAsyncOutputCacheProvider.dll and dependent assemblies will be copied to the Bin folder.
3. Open the web.config file, you will see two new configuration sections are added, caching and appSettings. The first one is to configure the OutputCache provider, you may want to update the table name. The provider will create the table if it doesn’t exist on the configured Azure service instance. The second one is the appSettings for the storage connection string. Depends on the connection string you use, the provider can work with either Azure CosmosDB Table or Azure Storage Table.
   

   ASP.NET Providers Connected Service Extension Update

   5 months ago, we released ASP.NET Providers Connected Service Visual Studio Extension to help the developers to pick the right ASP.NET provider and configure it properly to work with Azure resources. Today we are releasing an update for this extension which enables you configure ComosDB table OutputCache provider and Redis cache OutputCache.

   Summary

   The new CosmosDBTableAsyncOutputCacheProvider Nuget package enables your ASP.NET application leverage Azure CosmosDB and Azure Storage to store the OutputCache data. The new ASP.NET Providers Connected Service extension adds more Azure ready ASP.NET providers support. Please try it today and let us know you feedback.