Best Practices: Using Session in Windows Azure wit

问题:

Can anyone tell me that if I use Session(inside an ASP.NET MVC 3 application) in Windows Azure environment with multiple instances(means multiple virtual machines), then it work without any configuration or I need to use ASP.NET Universal Providers or I need to handle this manually by using AppFabric?

回答1:

You can't use in-process session state, but must use a shared session state provider.

The only supported session state model is to use Azure Cache, but you can use a provider that works with either Azure Storage or SQL Azure.

UPDATE:

I wrote some articles on my blog which go into using SQL Azure for session state with Entity Framework Code First. Hopefully, you'll find useful pointers there, even if you're not using Entity Framework.

Something to bear in mind using the standard SQL Server Session State Provider is that it doesn't have the retry logic which is considered good practice when working with SQL Azure.

回答2:

This discussion on ASP.NET MVC providers may help you:

http://azureproviders.codeplex.com/discussions/276053

, also, look here for how to implement a session provider using Azure AppFabric Caching:

http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2011/05/04/using-windows-azure-appfabric-caching.aspx

回答3:

"...Without any configuration..."

As Steve Morgan mentioned, The Azure AppFabric Cache provides a supported mechanism for caching. The cache itself is independent from your compute instances. In fact, a single cache could be accessed by multiple applications, if you wanted to use it in such a way.

Regarding configuration, you'll have to modify web.config, as the AppFabric Cache has a custom cache provider. The web.config snippet itself is auto-generated for you via the portal; it's as easy as copy-n-paste.

You can find out more info on caching, including sizes and pricing, here.