Release Notes NCache 4.8

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Introduction

NCache 4.8 contains a few important features related to runtime data sharing, messaging and .NET Core. This is a recommended upgrade for all NCache users.

Enhancements and New Additions

Following are some enhancements made in this release:

1. NCache Free Community Addition:

NCache 4.8 has now launched a FREE Community and it provides the powerful GUI based NCache Manager to let you easily configure caches from a central location. With NCache 4.9, users can enable the cache clusters to automatically recover from SplitBrain scenarios.

2. .Net Core Clients:

NCache now provides a totally native .NET Core Client that can run on both Windows and Linux. On Windows, NCache .NET Core client is installed through a Windows Installer (.msi). However, on Linux a separate installation (.tar.gz) is provided.

3. Docker Support:

NCache now fully supports Docker for both cache clients and cache servers. You can configure your .NET applications to be deployed in Docker and include NCache Client with it seamlessly.

4. ASP.NET Core Session Provider & IDistributedCache:

NCache now provides full ASP.NET Core support, both on .NET Framework and .NET Core (previously it was only on .NET Framework). This support includes a powerful ASP.NET Core Session Provider that has more features than the regular ASP.NET Core Session Provider. And, it also includes support for IDistributedCache interface in ASP.NET Core.

5. Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) with Topic:

Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) messaging paradigm is provided where a publisher sends messages into channels, without knowing who (if any) are the subscribers. And, Subscribers only receive message of their interest without knowing who the publishers are.

6. Entity Framework Core (EF Core) 2.0 Extension Methods for NCache:

NCache has implemented very easy to use EF Core 2.0 Extension Methods to allow you to cache application data that you’re fetching through EF Core 2.0.

7. Transport Level Security (TLS) 1.2:

All communication from NCache clients to NCache servers can now be optionally secured through TLS 1.2 (a newer specification than SSL 3.0). TLS 1.2 ensures that all data traveling between NCache clients and NCache servers is fully encrypted and secured.

8. Total Cache Management Thru PowerShell:

NCache traditionally provided powerful GUI based cache management tools and also a rich set of command line tools. Now, NCache has implemented all of its command-line cache management tools in PowerShell. You can now write PowerShell scripts for more sophisticated cache management.

9. Cache Client Keep Alive:

Some firewalls break idle network connections which causes problems in cache client to cache server communication in NCache. Cache Client Keep Alive feature, if enabled on client node, automatically sends light a weight packet to cache servers at configurable interval (sort of a heart-beat). These packets are only sent in case of no activity between clients and servers and therefore do not interfere with regular client/server traffic.

10. Thin NCache Manager Project Files:

NCache Manager used to keep some cache configuration information inside the project file. However, that used to cause data integrity issues if multiple people tried to modify cache configuration from different machines. To fix this, NCache Manager now does not store any cache configuration information inside its project files. Instead, all configuration information is kept on cache servers that are common from all places and not data integrity issue arises any more.

11. Cache Server-Only Licensing Option:

Traditionally, NCache has only provided a client/server licensing option that requires both cache clients and cache servers to be licensed. However, now NCache provides an additional server-only licensing option where the cache clients do not require any licenses. Only the cache server requires licenses. If you wish to use server-only licensing, then please contact your account manager for its details.

List of Bugs Fixed:

• 744156 FIX: Specific cache id could not be started exception occurs on starting cache. Occurs rarely.
• 744157 FIX: Enable compression on client cache results in wrong behaviors.
• 744158 FIX: Memory leak during state transfer.
• 744159 FIX: Null reference exception occurs to client while multiple add-remove operations on cache having eviction policy LFU.
• 744160 FIX: An already locked object is being locked when item fetched using GetCacheItem.
• 744161 FIX: Item is locked exception occurs on removing an item with correct lock handle.
• 744162 FIX: A locked item could not be fetched when correct lockhandle is passed to Cache.Get() with acquireLock= false.