A very simple Windows Azure AppFabric Cache Class

I have an application on windows azure which has both a worker and a webrole. I needed a way to send basic throw away info to the webrole from the worker role, so I decided to use windows azure cache. I created this very simple class which allows you to initialize a connection to the cache and use it for basic adding and reading of data.

Before using this class you need to AppFabric SDK from here. After installing the SDK Add a reference to the caching api by browsing and selecting the following file:

[SDK Install Path]\V1.5\Assemblies\NET4.0\Cache\Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Client.dll

Setup your azure cache instance then insert your access key and azure cache url in the code below.

Here is the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching;
using System.Security;

namespace Yoursite.Azure.Wrappers
{
    public static class CacheStore
    {
        private static DataCache _cache;

        static CacheStore()
        {
            // Declare array for cache host.
            DataCacheServerEndpoint[] servers = new DataCacheServerEndpoint[1];
            servers[0] = new DataCacheServerEndpoint("[YOUR-NAME-SPACE].cache.windows.net", 22243);

            // Setup DataCacheSecurity configuration.
            string strACSKey = "[INSERT KEY HERE]";
            var secureACSKey = new SecureString();
           
            foreach (char a in strACSKey)
            {
                secureACSKey.AppendChar(a);
            }
            secureACSKey.MakeReadOnly();
            DataCacheSecurity factorySecurity = new DataCacheSecurity(secureACSKey,true);

            // Setup the DataCacheFactory configuration.
            DataCacheFactoryConfiguration factoryConfig = new DataCacheFactoryConfiguration();
            factoryConfig.Servers = servers;
            factoryConfig.SecurityProperties = factorySecurity;
           

            // Create a configured DataCacheFactory object.
            DataCacheFactory cacheFactory = new DataCacheFactory(factoryConfig);

            // Get a cache client for the default cache.
            _cache = cacheFactory.GetDefaultCache();

        }

        public static void SetValue(string key,object value)
        {
            _cache[key] = value;
        }

        public static T GetValue<T>(string key)
        {
            return (T)_cache[key];
        }
    }
}

Usage:

var saveme = 856;
//Store value
CacheStore.SaveValue("savemekey",saveme);

//Retrieve value
var readme = CacheStore.GetValue<int>("savemekey");

Enjoy! Don’t forget to catch exceptions. My error logs show exceptions while attempting to communicate with the azure caching server every now and then.

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