Codename Velocity CTP3 for Vista SP1/XP SP3 Drops in March 2009

Microsoft is working on the next development milestone of its distributed in-memory application cache platform. In this regard, the Redmond company aims to wrap up the third Community Technology Preview of codename Velocity next month. March 2009 will be synonymous with the Redmond company's web-centric MIX conference, which is scheduled to debut on March 18 in Las Vegas. The release of Velocity CTP3 is slated to coincide, more or less, with MIX09.

“Microsoft distributed cache project codename 'Velocity' CTP3 is coming out soon, as we are working hard toward CTP3 launch (around MIX 09) with improvements in Scalability, Availability, Notifications etc,” a member of the velocity project revealed.

Coming with support for Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3, Velocity is currently available for download in CTP2 stage. The application cache platform is designed to deliver the next level of performance, availability and scalability for Cloud-based .NET applications. Multi-tiered web and enterprise apps involving CLR objects, XML documents, or binary data can all be cached via Velocity and made available to the end users instantaneously.

CTP1 of Velocity was made available in June 2008 with the second Community Technology Preview in October. “We have heard your feedback from CTP1 and incorporated many of the requests into CTP2. We have a very short list of new features which we are looking at including for V1 and focus exclusively on performance, stress exit criteria and product fundamentals such as stability, reliability and diagnosability of the product,” revealed Seshu Adunuthula, Velocity development manager, back in October 2008.

The next step for Microsoft's distributed in-memory application cache platform is CTP3, a release that will bring the project closer to finalization. According to Adunuthula, the first version of Velocity is planned to include notifications; read thru/write behind callbacks on CacheItem miss/update; secure access to named caches; cache get/put APIs with multiple objects; stability, reliability and diagnosability improvements.”