Heroku PaaS adds .NET support

Meeting a longstanding request from users, Salesforce’s Heroku — one of the original platforms as a service (PaaS) — has unveiled official support for .NET development. Heroku also made its Heroku Next Generation Platform available in a pilot. The company said the new platform, which supports cloud-native and AI applications, will become generally available in early 2025.

In a December 3 announcement, Heroku said developers now can build and deploy applications in C#, F#, and Visual Basic, leveraging frameworks such as ASP.NET Core and Blazor. In explaining its new .NET support, Heroku said .NET has evolved from a Windows-only framework to a cross-platform, open source ecosystem. Developers for years have relied on community-built buildpacks to run .NET apps on Heroku. Now .NET developers can expect a cohesive, reliable experience and consistent updates, rigorous testing, and quality assurance to build and scale applications, Heroku said.

A “getting started” tutorial for building a Blazor app using a Heroku PostgreSQL database is available at devcenter.heroku.com. Also available is Heroku .NET Support Reference documentation. In addition to .NET, Heroku lists Node.js, Python, Java, and Go as officially supported platforms. Heroku has faced criticism for offering limited deployment options.

The Heroku Next Generation Platform, now available in a pilot, is intended to address the needs of cloud-native and AI applications at scale with a “delightful” developer experience and a streamlined operator experience. The new platform release integrates AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) to support container-based applications, and integrates Amazon Bedrock to support managed inference and AI development. Heroku Managed Inference and Heroku Agents, also now available in a pilot, provide access to leading AI models from the top AI providers, Heroku said.