Sharing an HttpRuntime.Cache across two IIS applications

Question

I have two ASP.NET 2.0 applications in IIS; a public booking system and an admin system to manage prices. There is a shared DLL project that accesses the database, used by both applications.

To improve performance, the prices are cached in DLL code to save hitting the database on every request. However, when the administrator changes the prices, the cache is refreshed on the admin application (and obviously it isn't refreshed on the public application)

So, to the question. Is it possible to configure IIS so that these two applications share the HttpRuntime.Cache? If so, how should it be set up?

Answer 1

That would beat the point of having two applications - they should not share the same DLL memory heap, that would be needed. What you need is a communications channel between the two and have the admin web-pages notify about changes to the cache - which would cause a refresh.

May be something simple, but maybe a simple page you post to that causes the cache to check for updates? Or - have the application check for updates now and again based on a time stamp.

(Another option is to create a service where the cache resides, but I think that is outside the scope of a simple solution)