Asp.net MVC Output Caching During Development

During some asp.Net MVC development for a public website recently I have been looking at caching. The content of the site has minimal churn so I looked to use OutputCache. This works fine once it’s been finished and released. However it causes frustrations during development when you want to change something, compile, refresh and nothing happens.

One option is to comment out the OutputCache attribute, either on each action or on the specific controller, during development but that seems a bit crazy and isn’t sustainable. So what can we do about this?

A Preprocessor Directive is one potential answer; especially the #if and using DEBUG value for example:

#if !DEBUG
    [OutputCache(Location = OutputCacheLocation.Any, Duration = 36000)]
#endif
    public class HomeController : Controller
    {
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View();
        }

Now when you build in debug mode it will disable the caching and then once you’re happy and ready to release, change the build to “release” and it will be included ready to deploy to the production environment.