How to return HttpContext.Current.Cache from WCF?

Question

I have a WCF service hosted in IIS and want to return the data which is reside in the cache of IIS (HttpContext.Current.Cache) What is the most appropriate choice of type th

Answer 1

If I were you, I would not rely on the fact that the service is hosted in IIS. What if you wanted to host your WCF service with some other technology? I think you should check out memcached which is a much more general caching solution, and it works fine with .NET.

Anyway, if you really want to use the IIS cache, use System.Web.HttpRuntime.Cache instead of HttpContext.Current.Cache as the HttpContext is not always available.

Also, as cruizer said, the actual type of your objects is totally irrelevant as long as they are serializable (that is, the classes are decorated with the [Serializable()] attribute). The IIS cache itself does not require serializable objects but WCF does.