I stumbled across some of the Microsoft Virtual Labs the other day and thought I'd give the ASP.NET ones a try. My theory was that whilst they were pretty basic, there may well be areas that I just didn't know about. I've just been doing the ASP.NET 2.0 Data Access Virtual Lab and discovered the SQL Cache dependency. In recent projects we have always separated our data layer out completely, and made use of the Microsoft.ApplicationBlock.Data code to control our data access and so haven't needed to know about the EnableCaching property and its impact. So, the moral of this story is that they're worth persisting with even though they can be quite slow some times.