Automating Product Demo Preparation with ASP.NET Core

Every sprint eventually reaches the same point.

The feature is finished, the pull request has been merged, and QA is ready to begin testing. Before the team can share progress with product managers or stakeholders, someone usually needs to prepare a short demonstration.

The actual implementation may have taken several days, but creating demo material often becomes another manual task.

Recently I started experimenting with a small ASP.NET Core workflow that prepares demo information automatically whenever a feature reaches a specific status.

Project Architecture

The workflow is intentionally simple.

ASP.NET Core API
        │
        ▼
Collect Feature Metadata
        │
        ▼
Generate Demo Task
        │
        ▼
Export Prompt JSON
        │
        ▼
Review Demo Assets

The objective isn't to generate final marketing videos. Instead, it helps developers prepare consistent demo material for internal reviews.

Step 1: Expose Feature Metadata

Each completed feature already contains most of the information required for a demonstration.

A Minimal API exposes that information as structured data.

app.MapGet("/api/features", () =>
{
    return new[]
    {
        new Feature(
            "Timeline Editing",
            "Completed",
            true),

        new Feature(
            "Subtitle Export",
            "Completed",
            false)
    };
});

record Feature(
    string Name,
    string Status,
    bool RequiresDemo);

Keeping metadata inside the application avoids maintaining another spreadsheet or documentation file.

Step 2: Generate Demo Tasks

Whenever a feature is marked as requiring a demonstration, a small task file is created automatically.

foreach (var feature in features)
{
    if (!feature.RequiresDemo)
        continue;

    File.AppendAllText(
        "DemoTasks.txt",
        $"{feature.Name}{Environment.NewLine}");
}

Instead of asking developers what still needs a demo, the application already knows.

Step 3: Export Prompt Data

For our internal workflow, demo descriptions are stored as JSON.

var demo = new
{
    feature.Name,
    Duration = 8,
    Camera = "Medium Shot",
    Purpose = "Internal Review"
};

var json = JsonSerializer.Serialize(
    demo,
    new JsonSerializerOptions
    {
        WriteIndented = true
    });

File.WriteAllText(
    "demo.json",
    json);

Using structured data makes the output predictable and easier to modify later.

Step 4: Review Visual Assets

Once the JSON file has been generated, reviewers can create a quick visual prototype if necessary.

During one experiment, I used Seedance 2.5 to generate several short clips based on the exported prompt data.

The videos weren't intended for customers or marketing campaigns. Their only purpose was to help the development team verify whether the feature flow was easy to understand before scheduling a formal product demonstration.

Lessons Learned

Building this small automation produced a few practical improvements.

• Demo preparation became part of the development workflow instead of a separate task.
• Feature metadata remained synchronized with the application.
• Reviewers could understand new functionality more quickly.
• JSON files were easy to version alongside the source code.
• Developers spent less time repeating administrative work.

Final Thoughts

Development teams have already automated testing, builds, deployments, and code quality checks.

Preparing internal demonstrations still tends to be surprisingly manual.

Automating a small part of that process doesn't eliminate human review, but it reduces repetitive work and keeps demo preparation consistent across releases.

Sometimes a few hundred lines of supporting code can save far more time than another manual checklist.