Today we're featuring Keep Track of My Games built by Kamran Ayub. Kamram works as a Programmer Analyst at General Mills, doing web and application development.

What is Keep Track of My Games?

Keep Track of My Games aims to let you easily manage your collection of games and track unreleased games via email or TXT reminders. If you start tracking a game that hasn't been released, the app will email or TXT you a few days before the game comes out.

That was the core feature I wanted when I set out to make the site. Now I have a backlog of tasks that will keep me pretty busy! Things like custom labels, sorting, filtering, friends, Facebook/Steam/Windows Live authentication, popular tracked games, most added games, and much, much more. I am making my roadmap public so people can see what's in store.

How many users do you have?

I launched a weeks ago, so there's only a few dozen. I am hoping that number will climb as people tell their friends and I add more relevant features.

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

I like the affordability of AppHarbor as a guy working on his side project. I don't need a dedicated server, sophisticated server farm, etc. I just need a nice and easy way to build & deploy my site. I already have a web host for my other sites and I use that in conjuction with AppHarbor.

Which technologies is Keep Track of My Games built on?

I built it on Razor MVC 3, EF 4.1, and SQL Server 2008. I secure the site's user pages with SSL and AES database encryption.

I use two main services, GiantBomb and Twilio. GiantBomb provides me a REST API to get games via searching or lookup and I cache that data in my database. I then leverage Twilio to send out TXT messages to my users who opt in to SMS notifications. It works excellently (albeit the GiantBomb API is a little slow).

I use a private GitHub repository for Wiki and Issue management. I use GitHub's REST API to make my issues publicly available on the site itself. I do hide special tags, though, if the issue contains sensitive information.

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

It has been mostly awesome. Installing my SSL certificate was fairly straightforward, although it wasn't clear to me that I had to import it into IIS and export it as a .pfx. Once I figured that out, it worked great!

I leverage Configuration Variables quite a bit and have two applications (Prod and Dev). The variable injection is invaluable for this kind of setup.

How often do you deploy new versions?

I usually deploy every night, mainly because I have a long list of tasks to do. For large features, I may only deploy to development for awhile and then when ready, push to production.

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

I like the ease of pushing code to AppHarbor. I'd love to see more hooks into services like GitHub, so when I push to my GitHub repository, it triggers a build.

I'd also like to see some more explanation of features and cost on the pricing page. What kind of environment does the background worker run in? What's an example of the monthly cost for setting one up? You support SSL but don't mention it on that page. I don't think that page has changed much in recent months! Show off your services! You guys definitely deserve it.

Customer support is top-notch. I can usually get my question answered in 2-3 hours. You guys are all super helpful.

Anything else?

If you're reading this and like video games, you should definitely check out the site and tell me what you think. People have already given me excellent feedback!

If you're interested in testing or contributing to the codebase, drop me a line. We can definitely talk!

Today, AppHarbor's first employee is starting at our Copenhagen Office. His name is Mark Seemann, and we're extremely exited to welcome him aboard.

Mark writes a popular blog, has written a book on Dependency Injection in .NET, is the author of AutoFixture and is in the top 0.25 percentile of StackOverflow users. Do you see why we're excited?

You can subscribe to Mark's blog, follow him on Twitter and look at his code on GitHub and CodePlex.

AppHarbor HQ recently moved to the 28th floor of One Montgomery Tower and we're inviting Bay Area .NET developers to come delight in our vertigious view of the San Francisco Bay on Thursday night (July 28.). Since we're getting food and drinks, please let us know if you're showing up (so we can order enough for everyone and let security know you're coming).

Food will arrive around 7pm, but feel free to come earlier and hack on your favourite project with us. Jason Sirota (Director of Application Architecture at theknot.com) is joining us from Los Angeles, and we hope many more will find time to drop by.

Sign up for the event on the Alt.NET or SF .NET Startup Meetup groups. Or drop us a line at mf@appharbor.com.

This time around, we are featuring Loot 2012 Rentals. We have talked to Jake Scott (@jakescott) who works for loot.com. Jake is in the process of rebuilding loot.com and he has used the Loot Rentals site to test ideas and try out new technology.

What is loot2012rentals?

The tag line is "Find or rent a property for the London 2012 Olympics" - so basically it is a very basic site for listing your rentals as well as finding a place to rent during the Olympics. We've tried to make it easy for users to find somewhere to stay based on venues, events and locations.

How many users do you have?

At the moment we have less than 10 as we have just gone live. But we are going to do an email marketing campaign to drive some traffic and interest to the site. We are also going to be placing ads on Facebook as well as using the http://opengraphprotocol.org to try and get people to share adverts on Facebook.

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

Because manual deployments suck and are a huge waste of time! I think that deploying early and often and testing out new features on the actual hardware that your live site will use is very important. Using appharbor you can setup a staging and a live application, then use git remote to add them as remote repositories, and then push to staging or live in a matter of seconds! Its fun :)

Which technologies is loot2012rentals built on?

• Asp.net MVC 3.0 with Razor. I got started quickly by reading the code for nblog
• Autofac
• SquishIt - I think I will use Sass and Coffeescript in the future!!
• ServiceStack.Logging.Log4Net - I just log to the database and extended it like this.
• Elmah
• RazorEngine for email templates
• Amazon Simple Email Service to send emails
• Amazon Amazon Simple Storage Service for image hosting and storage of resized images.
• SQLServer, Full Text Search, Geography
• NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate - I regret this now and it caused a lot of grief. I ported the entire site to MongoDB for fun in 2 days, I would hate to try and do the reverse. In the future I will use something simple:
  • PetaPoco
  • Simple.Data
  • Dapper
• jQuery UI Aristo Theme
• Formalize CSS
• Geocode with Google Maps API v3
• jQuery multi-accordion
• jQuery Ad Gallery

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

I love the fact that I don't have to worry about the hardware and infrastructure side of things and can have a site live on the very first day of development. I think its more fun and agile to be adding features to your site every couple of hours using continuous deployment. There is no 'go live' day as the site just evolves and is done when its done. Life is too short for all that bureaucratic nonsense.

How often do you deploy new versions?

During development I was deploying the site every few hours as I added new functionality. I rebuild the database on app startup and populate it with dummy data. Its really easy to update marketing and SEO copy which everyone knows is a pain in the butt for developers!

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

Deploying with Git and the command line! I am using Mecurial and Git side by side without any worries.

I would love to see AppHarbor partner with other cloud services so that we can ensure fast network access to NoSql databases like MongoDB, and Redis (since talking to Jake, we have launched add-ons). Search tools using Lucene, RavenDB or elasticsearch would also be awesome! Also IP address based SSL is coming so I think we will be enabling that as soon as it arrives.

I think it would be nice if the Build queue screen was updated via AJAX so that I don't have to refresh the screen while waiting for the deploy :D

Anything else?

Would like to thank that AppHarbor team for building such a fantastic service and would like to wish them all the best for the future!

Thanks Jake, for taking the time to answer our questions!

We have got a long list of features that we want to add to the platform, both the ones you're suggesting on the feedback forum and plenty more that we aren't telling anyone about. We've also managed to secure solid financial backing and would love to grow our team. We are looking for superb engineers willing to work in either San Francisco or Copenhagen, Denmark.

Lots of .NET experience is not required, but a willingness to learn C# and .NET is. What is also required, is top-notch object oriented design and development skills, knowledge of distributed version control systems and experience building loosely coupled platforms. We also value web development experience, experience managing servers and database systems and experience with cloud platforms.

At AppHarbor, you'll get to work on one of the hottest and most talked-about products in the .NET ecosystem. Every day, you'll help make it easier for developers to deploy and scale their code so that they can spend their time building great apps. At AppHarbor, we try to live the product we build: We move fast and often deploy new features and fixes many times a day. AppHarbor offers competitive compensation including stock for top candidates.

Interested? Drop us a line at work@appharbor.com with links to code and projects that you've built. Preferably something hosted on AppHarbor.

Today AppHarbor is unveiling our add-on program. As of right now, you can add third-party services from MongoHQ (MongoDB), Cloudant (CouchDB), Redis To Go (Redis), Mailgun (email sending and receiving) and Memcacher (memcached). We have wanted to offer these kinds of services on AppHarbor for a long time, and we think that letting third party service providers onto the platform is the best way to get developers access to a wide selection of high-quality services.

Adding an add-on to one of your applications is very simply: Simply select 'Add-ons' from the application menu on appharbor.com/, find the add-on you want and then add it. This causes AppHarbor to provision the resource with the add-on provider so that it is ready for your application to use. The next time you deploy your application, AppHarbor will inject the required configuration information into your application so that the service can be consumed. You can find more detailed information on how that works for the various add-ons in the add-on section of the knowledge base.

We hope to soon offer many more exciting services as add-ons on AppHarbor. If you have an idea for a service that you think should be available (or if you think you can do a better job of providing a service already offered), you can start building an add-on right now. Our add-on API is based on Heroku's and the documentation is open. Have an idea for an add-on? Drop us a line at partner@appharbor.com.

We've been thinking about adding an API to AppHarbor for a while. So when Javier Lozano threw down the gauntlet and demanded build-notifications, Troels immediately picked it up.

1 hour and 20 minutes and 288 lines of code later, service hooks were live on AppHarbor. Seth Webster quickly demonstrated how to take advantage of the hooks and built TweetHarbor. If you want to build your own integration, you should check out the documentation and Seth's source code for TweetHarbor.

At AppHarbor, we pride ourselves on releasing early and releasing often. We can do so safely and confidently because the AppHarbor platform is self-hosting and capable of deploying new versions of itself. Building and deploying the service hook feature in 80 minutes is a great example of how AppHarbor makes deploying and scaling .NET applications a breeze. We call this continuous delivery, and we can't wait to help you deliver features faster and safer than ever before -- just like we do for AppHarbor.

Michael is at Community Day (Danish site) in Copenhagen, Denmark on May 26. He is on the Cloud Panel at 11am and will be hosting a session on AppHarbor at 2pm. If you're intested in AppHarbor, Cloud hosting or deploying .NET applications and at the conference, you shouldn't miss either.

Michael will be hanging out at the conference all day (including for dinner in the evening), so come say hi.

The AppHarbor workshop at the 2011 Seattle Alt.NET conference is currently under way and people are building apps and deploying them to AppHarbor. We're putting up a Parrot AR Drone for the indivisual or team that has the best application deployed to AppHarbor before noon PDT tomorrow (May 7.). To participate, submit your entry here.

Submissions will be judged by the AppHarbor team with points awarded for the following:

• Use of IronRuby, IronPython or F#
• App does something useful
• App is well-tested with unit tests executed by AppHarbor
• App was deployed multiple times during development
• App code is open sourced or app is based on open source code that you improved

Obligatory video demonstrating how much fun the AR Drone is:

Troels and Michael are currently at the Alt.NET conference in rainy Seattle. Troels is hosting a workshop this afternoon. If you're at the conference, we think you should come.

There is quite a bit of F# stuff happening at the conference. Yesterday, Adam Granicz talked about WebSharper, a F# based web development framework and Ryan Riley (author of Frack and Frank) is one of the organizers.

To demonstrate that AppHarbor will run F#, we've taken Tomas Petricek's F# MVC example and simplified and modified it so that you can push the code to AppHarbor and see it work. The application shows how you can use F# to implement MVC controllers. Get the code and see it run on AppHarbor.