Online product demo environment for Windows applications

Question

I'm looking for a way to allow potential customers to try my application before they buy it.

The product is a windows forms application that requires an SQL Server database to operate.

Although I have a functional demo that the customer can install on their network, I want to make it easier for them by have them "play" with it at my environment.

I remember Microsoft had (has?) something similar. I was testing Visual Studio a few years ago in a virtual environment where I was connecting to a server at Microsoft. They setup the environment this way so when a user logs off after using it rollback his actions. Or to explain it better: when a user logins it starts with a new, clean environment. So any projects I've created testing Visual Studio were lost after I logged off.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Some solutions that come to mind:

Provide remote access

You could provide access to a running instance of your application via some sort of remote connection protocol, e.g. via RDP or via VNC.

For example, there is a Java VNC client which can run as a Java applet; you could put that on a webpage and have it connect to a VNC session you host on your servers.

Or use Windows Terminal Server, and allow connection via RDP.

Both solutions of course have the drawback that people need to open the appropriate ports, if they are behind a firewall. There might be ways around that, however (e.g. you can run VNC over HTTP).

VM image

A completely different solution: Provide a ready-to-run VM image (for VMWare, VirtualBox or similar) of your application, including server and everything. You would need a demo version of your app though, plus getting redistribution rights for all the proprietary components (Windows OS, SQL server) might get hairy.

Offer videos

Often people do not really need to actually use the app; they are mainly interested to see how it works. So maybe it is enough to host videos of the app in operation. That allows you to put in some advertising for your features, and lets you show the users what they might miss when testing on their own.