Microsoft has made available for download the third Customer Technology Preview of a project the company is referring to as a distributed in-memory application cache platform. Microsoft Project Code Named “Velocity” Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) went live on April 7, 209, and is up for grabs via the Microsoft Download Center. The Redmond company promised that CTP3 would be offered in March 2009, with revised application programming interfaces and additional improvements, including an evolved cache notifications feature, a performance boost, security enhancements, and fresh options associated with cluster management. At the same time, Microsoft also tweaked the installation program for Velocity CTP3.

A member of the Velocity team revealed the “performance improvements: throughput, latency, and memory usage have been further optimized to improve performance for your applications,” adding that, in terms of security, “The cache host Windows service now runs under a lower-privileged account: Network Service,” and that “to streamline deployment, the installation program now supports automated installation for the cache host.”

Starting with CTP3, SQL Server can be used to handle the cluster management role. This option was not available in the previous community technology preview. In CTP2 of Velocity, only lead hosts were able to administer cache cluster operations. At the same time, the process of exiting cluster configuration settings is no longer dependent on the actual cluster configuration storage location where the configuration was stored. In addition, Microsoft has transformed cache notifications for Velocity in scenarios in which stored data is modified infrequently, so that the configured timeout was scrapped for updated objects to be grabbed from the cluster.

“To minimize changes in the following release, the 'Velocity' APIs have been changed to enhance usability and more closely resemble the naming conventions of other Microsoft namespaces. The namespace of 'Velocity' has been changed to Microsoft.Data.Caching from System.Data.Caching. Additionally, all class and delegate names have been renamed to include the prefix DataCache. Along with the name changes, many overloads have also been changed,” the Velocity team representative added.

Microsoft Project Code Named “Velocity” Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) is available for download here.