Featured App: The Sound of .NET

Our third featured AppHarbor application is The Sound of .NET, a .NET podcast directory built by Dragos Stefanescu. Dragos is a Certified Scrum Master and works for a big Romanian software company. In his free time he works with ASP.MVC and NHibernate on different projects.

What is The Sound of .NET?

On the web there is a lot of information about .NET technologies. There is not enough time to read it all, but it seems like, for me at least, there is time to listen. This is how The Sound Of .Net came to be. It's something I needed to stay abreast of what is new and what others are doing in the .NET realm.

How many users do you have?

This is kind of a hobby project for me and a couple of my friends to keep us in the game for now. Never looked for an audience so far but the future of this project could be changed if there are others that like it.

Which technologies is The Sound of .NET built on?

I am a fan of ASP MVC and I have been always reading, learning and developing with it since its birth in late 2007. When Razor arrived I knew I just had to learn it. And after I started with the first "@" sign I will never go back to the old style. The site runs fully on MVC 3 and Razor and all the new infrastructure MVC 3 provides in the latest version. The database access is through NHibernate 3 and there is also MVC Contrib for some fun stuff. This project has all the components I enjoy most about .NET.

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

I tried other cloud platforms, just to test them, but they didn't work for me. Nobody could match AppHarbors ease and speed of deployment. On AppHarbor it takes one command in the command prompt and my application is up and running in the cloud? This seems almost impossible but it is reality -- no need for another choice! For me, my current projects and the future ones, there is only your platform.

What did you like the best? Where could we improve?

Deploying with AppHarbor is easy and natural. I now have more time to spend on actually developing my application. AppHarbor running unit tests before deploys is also really great -- no other hosting environment, I know of, is doing this. Improvements I'd like see is file access and subdomains for administration and beta builds, and I am all good after that.

Anything else?

AppHarbor is making a big difference in the boring sphere of running applications in the web/cloud. You are making something that make developers feel happy!. AppHarbor is fun and easy, this is an explosive combination.

Thanks for the encouraging words Dragos! Have you built an application on top of AppHarbor and do you want it featured on the blog? Drop us a line and we'll get in touch.