Summary

ASP.NET provides some powerful APIs for managing state within your application. Features such as page output caching and partial page caching take advantage of the ASP.NET Cache to store frequently requested pages, or parts of a page, rather than execute them on each request. Output caching not only yields better performance, 2–3 times in most cases, but also makes your application more scalable since it can take the load off of other areas, such as the database. To take advantage of output caching and partial page caching, you need to consider both before you build your application; bolting them on later can be problematic.

Programmatically, ASP.NET provides three options for managing application state: Cache, Application, and static application variables. The Application API is redundant and replaced by the more feature-rich Cache API. Cache has many features that give you more control over how application state is managed. Cache API features such as dependencies and callback allow you to control how your state is being managed.