If you're a web developer who uses IE, you likely have your cache setting configured to check for new versions of each file "every visit to the page." This is no doubt due to a traumatic experience in your younger days where you spent 4 hours screaming at the screen "I know I updated this page -- where are my changes!!!??", only to realize that your files were changed, you were just looking at a cached version.
If you're developing on a Windows Server 2003 platform using IIS 6.0 (increasingly common for .NET developers), the default caching configuration of IIS can re-introduce this maddening issue. As explained here, if IIS 6.0 receives 2 requests for the same file within a 10 second window, it will add that file to the cache table and begin serving up the cached version. If no further requests are made within 30 seconds, that file is flushed from the cache.
So this means that if you browse to a local page and click a link that redirects to the same page (that's 2 requests in less than 10 seconds, time for the cache!), then notice a typo in your web page and fix it in 25 seconds, when you reload your page, the typo will not be fixed. Next you'll flip back to dev studio, doublecheck your work, scratch your head, then reload the page and see that your changes are still not there!!! Inevitably you'll walk away in disgust, only to return from lunch to find that your changes are now there. Maddening!
IIS 6.0 caching can be disabled globally by setting the DisableMemoryCache DWORD to 1. |