As part of our ongoing efforts to scale out the AppHarbor platform, we will be moving all hosted Microsoft SQL Server databases starting at 1 AM Pacific Standard Time on January 18. Each database should experience a maximum downtime of 15 minutes. The move should be completed at 3 AM at the latest. No data written to databases will be lost in the move. Web servers, MySQL servers and other AppHarbor infrastructure will not be affected.

Scheduled downtime will not be a regular feature of the AppHarbor going forward. We are working hard to make sure we can grow and scale the platform smoothly and without comprosing uptime for users.

In the event that we plan scheduled downtime in the future, we will work to ensure that users are adviced well in advance. If you have concerns or feedback on how we should handle scheduled downtime then post a comment, drop us a line at [email protected] or post feedback in the forum.

UPDATE: The move was completed without issue as of 1.45 AM (PST) January 18.

Yesterday Microsoft released the RTM version of ASP.NET MVC 3. We've added the relevant DLL's to the Global Assembly Caches of all AppHarbor web servers. This change may break apps using beta and release client builds of MVC 3 running on AppHarbor. If you find that you app is not working, please upgrade to MVC 3 RTM, fix any breakage and push to AppHarbor.

The breakage is due to Microsoft using the same DLL version number for both release client builds and RTM-builds of MVC 3. Thus, even though your app references a local lib-folder release client MVC 3 DLL, once we add the RTM dll to the GAC, your app will start using the GAC'ed one. There's no way to override that behaviour, unfortunately.

We add MVC dlls to the web server Global Assembly Caches to give developers coming on to the platform the best experience possible. ASP.NET MVC installs itself in the GAC on your local machine and we want to make sure that our platform is compatible with that configuration.

We are currently working with Microsoft to ensure that this will not be a problem with future versions of ASP.NET MVC.

Download ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM

At AppHarbor we use PowerShell to handle various administrative tasks. We also use Postmark to send emails. Daniel Crenna has created the Postmark .NET library and we have now wrapped that to create a PowerShell snap-in. The snap-in lets you send emails using Postmarks service, straight from your PowerShell.

Fork us on GitHub.

AppHarbor has been busy moving AppHarborHQ from wintery Denmark to (comparatively) balmy Mountain View. We're now firmly back in the saddle and adding features at rapid clip.

Attentative users may have noticed that creating MySQL databases has been possible for a while. We're now fairly confident that they work well, and this is the official announcement.

Our MySQL offering is based on Amazon RDS which means the good people of Amazon Web Services handle patching, backups and recovery.

We pledge to offer support for both Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, including in our free plan. We will do our utmost to make our Microsoft SQL Server option fast, reliable and competitively priced. Having said that, we expect to be able to offer MySQL on faster hardware and with more redundancy than SQL Server at the same price point. If you are planning to build an app on top of AppHarbor and have the option, we recommend you go with MySQL.

Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL will probably round out the relational database options we are going to offer in-house. Because we want to also offer your datastore of choice (if it's not SQL Server or MySQL), we are talking with lots of cloud-providers about adding their offerings as add-ons to our platform. If SQL Server or MySQL is not what makes your apps tick you can add a feature request to let us know what you need. Feature requests other than datastores are welcome too.

AppHarbor has been purring along in a very private beta for the last week and a half and we have gotten some valuable feedback. We’re now reasonably confident that the AppHarbor platform can receive, build and deploy your code.

Today we added support for SQL Server databases. You can add databases to your applications by clicking the “Add database” link on the application page. You’ll get a connection string for the database, and it’s (currently) your responsibility to configure your app to use that connection string when pushing to AppHarbor.

You can access the database from outside AppHarbor infrastructure, and connecting with SQL Server Management Studio from your local machine works fine. This makes getting data in and out of Appharbor fairly easy. Doing your own backups is also possible.

We are running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express right now (full SQL Server will come later) so the usual size restrictions (10 GB database size/1 GB memory) apply. Note that SQL Server Full Text indexing is not enabled. Also please don’t move very large amounts on and off our servers. We haven’t implemented any limits on use yet, and we prefer not to incur massive bandwidth costs.

Want to try out our new SQL Servers, but don’t yet have an account? Sign up for an invite here, and we’ll be in touch shortly.

Welcome to AppHarbor. We’re building af Git-enabled .NET Platform-as-a-Service. That means we’ll build, deploy and host your .NET websites for you. To get started all you have to do is to create an account and git push your code to AppHarbor. Your app will be built by our platform and deployed to our managed IIS servers where it will have access to a fully compatible .NET and Windows stack including your choice of SQL Server or MySQL (with more database options to come). AppHarbor will have a free plan to get you started while dedicated hardware, loadbalancing, background tasks and other services can be purchased for your app as add-on services.

Who are we? Well there’s Troels who’s been hacking since age 12 and is a contributor to DotNetOpenAuth. There’s Rune, who — besides being an experienced .NET-hand — is a great fan of Ruby on Rails and Heroku. And there’s Michael who’s been developing .NET websites of all sorts for the last five years.

We’re building AppHarbor because we love C# and ASP.NET MVC and because we think Git is the best versioning system around. Deploying .NET web apps can be kind of a hassle, however. By building AppHarbor we want to solve the problem of deploying .NET web applications once and for all. By offering AppHarbor as a service, we want to take the hassle of deploying your .NET websites of your shoulders too. Non-MVC and non-C# code is welcome too of course.

We’re furiously hacking away on AppHarbor right now and are slowly letting beta-testers onto the platform. If you want to help us test and break our code, go sign up at appharbor.com and we’ll drop you a line once we are ready to welcome you aboard.