Question

I have a webservice that stores an authenticated users token in the HttpRuntime.Cache to be used on all subsequent requests. The cached item has a sliding expiration on it of 24 hours.

Secondly I have a vb.net app that is pinging this webservice every 15 seconds. It gets authenticated once, then uses the cached token for all subsequent requests. My problem is that the application appears to lose authentication at random intervals of time less than the 24 hr sliding expiration. However with it getting pinged every 15 sec the authentication should never expire.

I am looking for a way to view the HttpRuntime.cache to try and determine if the problem is in the webservice security methods or within the vb.net app. Can I view the HttpRuntime.cache somehow?

The webservice is part of a web forms site that was built with asp.net 2.0 on a Windows Server 2008.

Answer 1

The name of my key’s were unknown as they were system generated guid values with a username as the value. So in order to view a cache collection that was unknown I used a simple loop as follows.

Dim CacheEnum As IDictionaryEnumerator = Cache.GetEnumerator()
While CacheEnum.MoveNext()
    Dim cacheItem As String = Server.HtmlEncode(CacheEnum.Entry.Key.ToString())
    Dim cacheItem2 As String = Server.HtmlEncode(CacheEnum.Entry.Value.ToString())
    Response.Write(cacheItem & ":" & cacheItem2 & "<br />")
End While

Hope this helps others.