ASP.NET MVC Output Caching with Windows AppFabric Cache

Enterprise level web applications are typically hosted in web farms where in-process caching is less useful than a distributed caching approach such as Windows Server AppFabric or Memcached. Thanks to the extensibility features introduced with ASP.NET 4.0, modifying an application to use a distributed cache is a very simple process. This post explains how to create an AppFabric OutputCacheProvider and how to configure ASP.NET to use the new provider. We will also discuss a big limitation with the MVC3 OutputCacheAttribute and explain how this is addressed by the MvcDonutCaching NuGet package.