The Velocity blog is pimping the following.

Project “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. “Velocity” fuses memory across multiple computers to give a single unified cache view to applications.

And after listening to the latest Hanselminutes Podcast on Velocity it has me a interested.

I am currently working through the process of evaluating various Distributed Caching Options for the next version of an enterprise app that we are building, Velocity will go on the watch list.

This is something that has been seriously missing for most .net developers. The feature set is still being developed to include Cache Linq as mentioned on the Hanselman Podcast. The current CTP brings the following.

• Caches any serializable CLR object and provides access through simple cache APIs.
• Supports enterprise scale: tens to hundreds of computers.
• Configurable to run as a service accessed over the network or run embedded with the application.
• Supports common cache configurations.
• Supports dynamic scaling by adding new nodes.
• Configurable number of backup copies to provide high availability.
• Automatic load balancing.
• Integration with administration and monitoring tools such as ETW, System Center, etc.
• Provides tight integration with ASP.NET to be able to cache ASP.NET session data in the cache without having to write it to source databases. It can also be used as a cache for application data to be able to cache application data across the entire Web farm.
• Follows the cache-aside architecture (also known as Explicit Caching) for V1. That is, you must decide explicitly which objects to put/remove in your applications and “Velocity” does not synchronize with any source database automatically.
• Support for multiple client languages (for example, PHP, C#, C++, etc.).

Dare has a post on velocity’s finer points. Also check out the Velocity’s MSDN page and download and play with the bits.