I recently came across an error that did not make any sense while deploying pre-compiled ASP.NET applicatication. This error did not tell me what the problem was. After doing some research online I came across asp.net forum and this. The solution basically came down to copying the new assemblies that I just added to my project to the bin folder of the deployment servers. These assemblies were added to my (on my machine) GAC (global assembly cache) where they are available to all the applications and do not need to be copied to the bin folder on my machine. But they need to be copied to servers where these new asseblies are not registered in GAC. I just wish the runtime error could be a little more informative instead of completely giving me the wrong message.

So make sure you have all the assemblies either present on the deployment servers or just copy them when building and pre-compiling ASP.NET applications.  

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Server Error in '/' Application.

The file '/default.aspx' has not been pre-compiled, and cannot be requested.

Recently Microsoft Velocity product was announced at TechEd. Other than the vague name, this product seems a good fit with .net solutions where heavy caching is required in a clustered environment over many physical servers (or just one). This product seems highly configurable and easy to use. This will simplify the session management in ASP.NET solution as well as allow developers to load lookup data from database or any back end stores instead of using ASP.NET caching or singletons. With high scalability, and reliability over distributed architecture, this product definitely a good one to have in your toolbox. Remember Velocity is at its very early stages and it is going to evolve with community feedback.

Managing session state over web farms usually is configured with some backend database servers to provide centralized persistance, but this is slow compared to accessing the same data from memory and you should be able to get significant difference in performance.

It would be nice if this caching architecture provided a asynchronous backend data persistance capability. This will allow us to load large tables that are often used for lookups but rarely updated in order to avoid updating them seperately and invalidating the cache.

Here is MSDN page for Velocity and a pod cast from hanselman.com along with many other resources.