Feeling the Cache Love

I've been working on the business and data layers for a web system and, as you might expect, I've been making quite a bit of use of ASP.NET's caching system. Now, to test the business layer, I had gone ahead and set up a non-ASP.NET caching system as well using my standard method for caching in Windows applications, a static hashtable with strongly typed string keys (works well, fairly compatible with the ASP.NET cache so it is easy to move code between the two models) but then I realized that I could just use the ASP.NET cache even when my code was being used from a Windows Forms applications (for my class libraries, where I don't know what type of interface is being used) and it works just fine.

Shared Function GetValueFromCache( _
ByVal key As String) As Object
Dim myContext As HttpContext
myContext = HttpContext.Current

If myContext Is Nothing Then
Return HttpRuntime.Cache.Get(key)
Else
Return myContext.Cache.Get(key)
End If
End Function

Shared Sub PlaceValueIntoCache( _
ByVal key As String, _
ByVal item As Object, _
ByVal cacheDuration As Integer)
Dim myContext As HttpContext
myContext = HttpContext.Current
Dim myCache As Caching.Cache

If myContext Is Nothing Then
myCache = HttpRuntime.Cache
Else
myCache = myContext.Cache
End If

myCache.Insert(key, item, Nothing, _
Now.AddSeconds(cacheDuration), _
Caching.Cache.NoSlidingExpiration)
End Sub

This might be common knowledge, but I have been handling my own non-ASP.NET caching all on my own, and this just makes it too easy. In fact, it makes it so easy that I started thinking of ways to perform even more caching in some of my Windows Forms applications... I can see many performance gains in my future!