I have received several great emails from people who have tried the Visual Studio 11 ALM Virtual Machine and the accompanying hands-on-labs / demo scripts. Thanks for all of the positive feedback!

I also know that for some people, a Hyper-V virtual machine like this one can be a bit hard to get started with. You might not have the requisite hardware and Windows Server hosting environment, or sometimes you just want to quickly demonstrate one of these capabilities to a colleague or user group without the overhead of booting into the virtual machine. For this reason, I have just published a set of DemoMates for each of the 6 ALM hands-on-labs / demo scripts I published last month.

A DemoMate is a Silverlight-based rendering of a software demo which can be used to easily learn a demo or show it to an audience (albeit in a strict, linear format). It’s not a substitute for the virtual machine and being able to go “off road” of the script, but if you plan on sticking to the script then it’s the next best thing.

While you’re using the DemoMates, you can use the options in the lower-right corner to go full screen, switch between auto-play and manual advancing modes, turn presenter scripts on or off, and so on. As you hover your mouse over these items they should become self-explanatory, so I am not going to cover all of the settings here.

You can run these DemoMates online, or if you plan on using these in an environment where you might not always have Internet access then I suggest installing the offline version.

Online:
Agile Project Management in Team Foundation Server 11
Building the Right Software - Generating Storyboards and Collecting Stakeholder Feedback with Visual Studio 11
Diagnosing Issues in Production with IntelliTrace and Visual Studio 11
Exploratory Testing and Other Enhancements in Microsoft Test Manager 11
Making Developers More Productive with Team Foundation Server 11
Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 - MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, and Code Clone

Offline: (gets installed locally on your computer)
Agile Project Management in Team Foundation Server 11
Building the Right Software - Generating Storyboards and Collecting Stakeholder Feedback with Visual Studio 11
Diagnosing Issues in Production with IntelliTrace and Visual Studio 11
Exploratory Testing and Other Enhancements in Microsoft Test Manager 11
Making Developers More Productive with Team Foundation Server 11
Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 - MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, and Code Clone

I hope you’ll enjoy these as another way of learning about the application lifecycle management scenarios that Microsoft is investing in with Visual Studio 11.