What are the advantages of Memcached compared to .NET Cache system?

Question

I saw some people in a development team using Memcached to cache database results, instead of built-in .NET Framework Cache system. I do not understand clearly why would they us

Answer 1

A better comparison for Memcached would actually be Azure App Fabric Caching, which was added with .NET 4 and Azure. It is a distributed cluster-able cache solution intended for clustered and cloud computing. However, Memcached has also been around for a long time (2003-ish I think), so is well established, and considered to be the benchmark by which others are judged. Memcached has also been ported to just about every language out there, and can be run on linux or windows servers. Azure Caching is still relatively new, so not many people have really used it yet.