Our fifth featured AppHarbor application is bet-mate.com. We have talked to Nikolas Tziolis, one of the three founders. Nikolas keeps the site running and supervises the bet-mate developers.

What is bet-mate.com?

Recently someone from Sequoia Capital put it in the simplest form I can imagine: bet-mate.com is the Bloomberg or Reuters for sports events.

We're currently focused on football (or soccer, if you will). bet-mate.com gives members an overview of the current betting market situation as well as detailed insights on specific events. The focus is to identify market trends and visualize these trends in a fashion that lets our members utilize them. The goal is not to predict results, but to highlight trends in the market.

Most of our customers are full-time strategic sports-bettors that use our data to improve their bottom line results.

How many users do you have?

We currently have ~10k unique visitors per day.

The average time-on-site is 30 minutes. bet-mate generates a lot of server-load because the site performs JSON-requests to refresh page data in the visitors browser every 30 seconds.The site is extremely data heavy and we perform a huge amount of caching to be able to serve as many visitors as we do.

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

Previously we self hosted bet-mate.com within multiple virtual containers. We were unhappy with the effort we had to put into keeping everything running smoothly, so we started looking at cloud-based hosting.

Since bet-mate is .NET-only, we tried to host the site on Windows Azure. We spent a lot of time trying to get Azure working but we were ultimately unable to port bet-mate to Azure for a number of reasons:

• General complexity of the Azure platform
• No DNS management
• No load balancing
• Some library incompatibilities
• And last, but not least: pricing

We also looked into using Amazon as a cloud hosting platform, but the many options and the fact that we had to manage resources ourselves, made us discard this option too.

So how did we end up using AppHarbor? I think I first heard about AppHarbor via a tweet from one of the guys on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. We tried it and it just worked!

We were able to setup the page in less than 30 minutes, with no previous AppHarbor experience. After the initial setup, we simply added the AppHarbor instance as an additional node in our cluster. Over a period of one month, the AppHarbor instance was the most reliable of all the instances in our cluster.

During this month, we encountered multiple small issues. The AppHarbor staff always solved our issues very quickly, even on weekends. This is extremely important for us since 80% of our business is on the weekend.

We were also impressed with how simple DNS management and database creation was.

For the above reasons we chose to switch to AppHarbor entirely.

Which technologies is bet-mate.com built on?

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor
• WCF JSON service
• Windows Server AppFabric Caching
• SQL Server 2008 R2

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

In short: It just works, and that's the hole point. In the past, it was quite an effort to ensure site availability, especially with a growing visitor/customer base. AppHarbor has taken away that pain.

How often do you deploy new versions?

A couple of times per week. The beauty is that if something doesn't work, we can roll back to a known working state within seconds. We use this feature frequently. Our customers constantly request new features and it's important for us to fulfill their requests as fast as possible.

Using AppHarbor we have cut the time, from first getting the request to deploying it, by half. We tend to deploy things right away and roll back if problems arise. Our customers are very happy with this strategy because it lets them influence the outcome of a new feature much earlier than before.

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

The best part has got to be the smooth deployment experience. I've been working in IT for 15 years and I have never seen deployments as smooth as these. From not knowing a system to having deployed a fairly complex website on AppHarbor in 30 minutes is a record!

So what do I wish for?

• detailed monitoring
• background services
• build in distributed caching
• database backup availability via ftp or another protocol (for local archiving)
• additional data centers (Europe/Asia)
• SSH for authentication

Anything else?

Thank you AppHarbor, for saving us multiple times already after we have moved our site to AppHarbor. Some deployments simply crashed the page, and some went crazy on the database (always our fault) but we could always count on you having our backs.

And thank you Nikolas for taking the time to answer our questions and for hosting bet-mate.com on AppHarbor!

Thanks to all your votes, AppHarbor is presenting at MIX11. Our kick-ass session on Agile .NET Cloud-Deployment with Git is on Thursday from 12pm to 1pm in the Lagoon B room.

Rune and Michael will be hanging out at the conference all week, starting with the Open Source Fest Monday night. Send us a message on Twitter if you want to meet up.

If the schedule permits, we'll try to arrange a AppHarbor hackathon at some point during the conference. Stay tuned.

Our fourth featured AppHarbor application is BetterDate.Me, built by Wesley Tansey.

What is BetterDate.me?

BetterDate.Me is an app that analyzes your online dating profile and tells you how people are likely to feel after reading it. I built it as a demo of an NLP algorithm we've developed at EffectCheck that can measure the subliminal emotional impact of a body of text.

It turns out a lot of words have an emotional impact on us that we don't even realize. Studies have shown, for example, that if you're walking down the road and you see the word "ELDERLY" written on a sign, you'll actually walk slower without realizing it.

BetterDate.me measures these subconscious effects of your dating profile across six emotions: anxiety, hostility, depression, confidence, compassion, and happiness. Each emotion is scored on a simple scale of "very low" to "very high" and each profile is summarized using a catchy summary metaphor/icon at the top of the results.

The goal is to help people understand and potentially improve their profile to be more attractive to prospective dates.

How many users do you have?

We've just soft-launched to a few friends right now to get feedback. We're preparing to launch a marketing campaign for the site in a few days.

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

I have used Heroku before, but I'm not a huge Ruby fan, so when AppHarbor launched I was really excited. Thus far I haven't been let down.

Which technologies is BetterDate.me built on?

It's built in ASP.NET MVC 3 (Razor engine) and Fluent NHibernate.

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

Flawlessly! The workflow is super smooth, the dashboard UX is straight-forward, and support has been excellent.

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

So far I haven't had any complaints. The database we use for BetterDate.me is around a million rows. When I was having trouble uploading that much data, Michael wrote a great utility to help me out.

I think the next important addition for me will be background tasks. Most of my projects involve some sort of machine learning algorithm, so it'd be great if I could launch a background task to run the algorithm and update the user when the algorithm is finished.

Anything else?

I really think AppHarbor is on to something. I'm planning on using it to build the full EffectCheck site, including our developer API. We're looking to find a few developers interested in scoring emotional impact in their own applications. If anyone would like an invite to the closed beta, just email me: wes.tansey@gmail.com.

Building on AppHarbor has been a blast. I'm looking forward to using you guys for a long time! :)

We know that debugging AppHarbor applications is sometimes a pain because exceptions and stacktraces can be hard to come by. To help you out, AppHarbor now logs all WebRequestErrorEvents surfaced by ASP.NET Health Monitoring. Errors for your applications are available from the individual application pages by following the "Errors" link.

AppHarbor application-error logging is not meant as a substitute for full-on event-logging and monitoring add-ons like New Relic and Hoptoad, but it should work great for debugging deployment problems when moving applications to AppHarbor.

Visual Studio 2010 lets you maintain multiple different Web.config configurations for debug, staging, release and so forth. The different versions are stored as XML transformations that are applied to the master Web.config file when a site is deployed. There's more information on MSDN.

AppHarbor has it's own way of managing multiple environments. We think it's simple and easy to use, and it's what we use for our own sites. ASP.NET Web.config transformations are arguably more powerful though, and are extensible, amongst other things. At AppHarbor, we strive for maximum compatibility with the ASP.NET stack, and we fully support web.config transformations.

The transformation syntax is a bit dense and figuring out why transformations are not working as expected can be a chore. To help people quickly debug problems and experiment with transformations, we have created a Web.config transformation tester. Go try it out, it's hosted right here on AppHarbor.

We have found that you -- loyal AppHarbor users -- are the best evangelist we have. To reward users who convince friends and collegues to use AppHarbor, we're giving away .NET Reflector Pro licenses (courtesy of Red Gate Software) to the 20 people who generate the most signups in the next 10 days. The user who generates the most signups also receives $100 worth of AppHarbor credits, redeemable when we start charging. You'll get 1 point for each signup and an extra point for each new user that also pushes a commit that builds succesfully.

To know which new users were invited by whom, use this link for invites: https://appharbor.com/account/new?referrerUsername=MyUsername (replace MyUsername with your AppHarbor username).

The competition ends on 23:59 PST March 23 2011, so start sending out those links right away.

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.

You asked for it, and we built it: You can now use Mercurial to push code to AppHarbor. We have partnered with Bitbucket to handle the actual Mercurial repository hosting. This means there's currently a bit of setup to get started. We're working with the good folks at Bitbucket to automate the setup.

This is how the process works:

1. Create a Bitbucket account if you don't have one already
2. Create a Bitbucket repository and grant the apphb user read rights
3. Create an AppHarbor application
4. Create a Bitbucket service-hook that POSTs to the AppHarbor "Create Build URL" when a push is received (URL is found on the AppHarbor application page)
5. Start pushing to the Bitbucket repository.

There's a full guide with screenshots in the knowledge base.

Every time you push to the Bitbucket repository, the POST service you configured on Bitbucket will notify AppHarbor of the push. AppHarbor will use the apphb user to retrieve your code and build and deploy it.

We have received some questions on how to best move data to and from AppHarbor hosted SQL Server databases and this is an issue we have been struggling with ourselves. Users running MySQL databases can use mysqldump, but there is no good SQL Server equivalent for large databases (bcp.exe only copies one table at a time).

For databases with limited data, SQL Server can script both database schema and data using SQL Server Management Studio. For databases with tables with many rows, the generated scripts grow too large to manage.

To handle those cases, we have written a simple console application that copies data between SQL Server databases. The app uses SQL Server Management Objects to retrieve table information and SqlBulkCopy to copy the actual data.

Here's an example of copying data from an AppHarbor database to a local database: AppHarbor.SqlServerBulkCopy.exe --srcserver=db000.appharbor.net --srcusername=dbxx --srcpassword=srcpassword --srcdatabasename=dbxx --dstserver=.\SQLEXPRESSADV --dstusername=dbyy --dstpassword=dstpassword --dstdatabasename=dbyy --ignoretables=TableToIgnore

It's currently up to you to make sure that the database schemas match. The app currently also only supports SQL Server authentication.

To get started, grab the code on GitHub, build it, and start copying. For optimal performance, you should run the app on the machine that houses the database you are copying to or from. The app has been tested with AppHarbor but should work with any pair of recent Microsoft SQL Server databases.

For the second installment in the AppHarbor Featured App blog post series, we're profiling Rook, built by João Paulo Bochi. João works as a software developer for Dell in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

What is Rook?

Rook is a game-engine under construction. The goal is to support almost any kind of turn-based strategy game.

More than strictly abstract games (such as Chess), games with random factors (like Backgammon) will also be covered. The main feature, though, will be support of games with hidden or uncertain information. One classic example is Stratego, but I have some ideas that may be much more interesting. Theoretically, one game that could be implemented is Sid Meier's Civilization.

In order not to lose focus, I'll be focusing on the features required for my target game, Duelo. It was invented by me and my brothers quite a few years ago.

How many users do you have?

Rook is a hobby project, but may turn out to be more than that. Since Rook is just starting, the only users I have are friends willing to work as beta testers.

I imagine that Duelo alone has the potential to attract thousands of user. Its flexibility and randomness keeps the game very addictive. Every match is totally different from the others. I know that because I have one very old implementation of it. Unfortunately, it only works in hot-seat mode.

Why did you choose AppHarbor?

I read a blog post about Apharbor on Aaronontheweb. It looked much better than other hosting services. It already had MVC3 one day after RTM, for example. The web page is extremely simple and clear. And it's free. I decided to give it a try, and I have not been disappointed.

Which technologies is Rook built on?

ASP.NET MVC 3, Ninject, and xUnit.net.

How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?

The whole experience has been great. Pushing and deploying worked very smoothly. My unit tests ran automatically and I didn't even know it was supported. The environment and connection strings management is very neat, too.

The application configuration page is as simple as it can get. And all the options are easily available. It's an inspiration to anyone buiding a web site.

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

I liked the way how everything is convention-based, making any specific configuration unnecessary. Before the first deploy, I was wondering how Appharbor would know which web project to publish. It's obvious, just use the only web project that I pushed.

I think more documentation is still needed, but that's just a matter of time. The way connection strings are handled, for example, were documented today. Coincidentally, the same day I looked for it.

Anything else?

Rook is open source. Anyone who wants to snoop into the code can go to https://bitbucket.org/jpbochi/rook. Collaborators are welcome.