Microsoft's "Velocity" project
Some skillful people at Microsoft have started yet one interesting project to increase our toolbox. It's "Velocity" which targets to help dealing with caching - local and distributed - through all the .NET application types, not just ASP.NET.
From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/fi-fi/library/cc645013(en-us).aspx
“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. Applications can store any serializable CLR object without worrying about where the object gets stored. Scalability can be achieved by simply adding more computers on demand. “Velocity” also allows for copies of data to be stored across the cluster, thus protecting data against failures. “Velocity” 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 that enables ASP.NET session objects to be stored in the distributed cache without having to write to databases. This increases the performance and scalability of ASP.NET applications
See also:
Team Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/velocity
Forum
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=2142&SiteID=1
Download
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B24C3708-EEFF-4055-A867-19B5851E7CD2&displaylang=en
Of course at first I'm thinking that does this bring anything added value compared to 3rd party products - price is one likely, of course - or to Caching Application Block. Push based notifications is a big wish for this sort of tool, and I strongly think pretty well reasoned too.