I would like to create and archive a collection of demo ASP.NET web form applications that show projects with certain features in the sense "this feature can be implemented like this" -- to be presented to a potential customer.
Before the presentation, I would like to get the selected set of demo and install them easily to the notebook. Each of the demos will be "frozen". The target notebook is not the customer's one. It is one of our ones that is bring to the customer for the presentation. This way, it can be prepared in the sense that a named MS SQL instance with the fixed name can be ready, etc.
Can you share some experience with such situation? (I do not want to have marked this question as of opinionated; so please, if you have some explicit links to the related documents or explicit suggestions...)
Here are some other facts and initial ideas:
- Each of the demo projects uses two databases:
xxx_users
(the standard ASP.NET authentication...), andxxx_application
(and possiblyxxx_external
) wherexxx
is a prefix for the specific project. - The demo application is expected to be compiled (binary only, no sources needed for the presentation).
- The
Web.config
files can use thelocal\SQLINSTANCEFORDEMOS
in connection strings. - The SQL instance has a fixed name, fixed administrator account (like
sa
) and fixed password for the logging to the SQL instance. This way, it can be included in theWeb.config
files. - The sample data can be fairly big (not extremely tiny).
- The application will use its own SQL tables in the
xxx_application
database. - The application will simulate the outer database that is accessed from the web application can be simulated by
xxx_external
database.
This way, I should be able to create and archive SQL backups of xxx_users
, xxx_application
, and xxx_external
databases, plus the archive of the web app binary.
Have you ever encountered this situation? Is the approach reasonable? Could you share some better ideas?