The NOSQL movement originally found its community roots in some the “edgier” platform & languages of this world; CouchDB in particular, has always felt strongly backed by a certain kinship with the Ruby and Rails communities, amongst others. But as one of the most mature NOSQL projects out there, CouchDB now also enjoys energetic support in the more established communities such as PHP, Java or even .NET.

As it turns out NOSQL isn’t the only movement kindling a relationship with the .NET framework. The “Cloud” has also taken root in that community, and a service called AppHarbor has arisen to meet the demand for reliable, elastic & pay-as-you-grow .NET hosting.

I’d be beating around the bush if I introduced AppHarbor as anything else but “Heroku for .NET”. That description may sound catchy but in and of itself, does not a great service make. No, what really caught our eye about our fellow ex-YCombinator brethren Michael, Rune & Troels, is their flawless execution of the concept and their tactful tweaks to the Platform-as-a-Service model. By giving you access to the Common Language Runtime and the .NET framework, AppHarbor opens more doors for developers than just single-language execution. You instantly gain access to the years of loving care, performance tuning and functional extensions that Microsoft has poured into its platform, as well as support for a flurry of languages.

So today, we’re happy to announce the Cloudant add-on for AppHarbor. It will give you instant provisioning of our hosted CouchDB solutions, for all your hosted .NET apps. Your Cloudant databases will be co-located in the same datacenter as AppHarbor, so you can enjoy the same reliability & performance you’ve come to expect from Cloudant, with the absolute minimal latency possible. And on the business side, you’ll also get the accounting convenience of a single monthly bill for both your app & data hosting expenses. (Don’t forget to put a coversheet on that TPS report before running it by the boss, though!)

So go on ahead and get started with one of the many CouchDB libraries available for the .NET framework, such as Divan, Relax, Hammock or EasyCouchDB. Or peruse this recent introduction to CouchDB for .NET developers. (And please send us an email to show us what you’ve built with AppHarbor + Cloudant!)

What are you still doing here? Go sign up for AppHarbor… You’re in good hands with Michael, Rune & Troels.