YC-Funded AppHarbor: A Heroku For .NET, Or “Azure Done Right”

You may be noticing a trend: there are a lot of startups looking to mimic the easy-to-use development platform that made Heroku a hit with Ruby developers and offer a similar solution for use with other languages. In the last few weeks alone we've written about PHP Fog (which, as you'd guess, focuses on PHP) and dotCloud (which aims to support a variety of languages). And today we've got one more: AppHarbor , a 'Heroku for .NET'. The company is funded by Y Combinator, and it's launching today. AppHarbor will be going up against Microsoft Azure, a platform that developers can use to deploy their code directly from Visual Studio. But founder Michael Friis says that Azure has a few issues. For one, it uses Microsoft's own database system, which can lead to developer lock-in. And it also doesn't support Git, which many developers prefer to use for collaboration and code deployment.