AFAS Software

Optimising the performance of a modern WPF business application.

AFAS Software is a Dutch family-owned company that specialises in developing business software for organisations across the Netherlands and beyond. Their integrated suite covers ERP, HRM, CRM, and financial administration, and is relied on by thousands of small, medium, and enterprise customers to run the day-to-day operations of their businesses.

AFAS had recently completed a significant modernisation of their flagship desktop product, migrating the underlying code base from a legacy VB6 implementation to a modern VB.NET and C# codebase built on WPF. The team had identified that the loading times of the WPF screens were not meeting the performance bar they wanted to hit. The application makes intensive use of user controls, custom controls, and custom panels, alongside third-party frameworks such as DevExpress and ReactiveUI — all of which offer significant productivity gains, but can introduce subtle performance characteristics that compound in a large, complex application.

AFAS engaged endjin to help them understand where the performance cost was coming from, and to put a plan in place to address it. The engagement began with an initial review of the platform, building a clear picture of the application architecture, the composition and data-binding patterns in use, and the way the third-party component libraries were being applied. endjin then presented observations and recommendations, identifying the high-priority candidates for improvement — distinguishing between quick-win optimisations, structural changes with a larger payoff, and areas where the existing design was already sound.

With those priorities agreed, endjin moved into a technical programme alongside AFAS's engineering team, working to mitigate the issues that had been identified. The aim was to leave the team not only with a faster, more responsive application, but with the diagnostic techniques, profiling habits, and WPF performance patterns they could apply themselves as the product continues to evolve.

Endjin helped us to find the performance bottlenecks in our WPF based application running on XenApp clusters. They quickly identified bottlenecks and suggested changes to mitigate the issues. Endjin upskilled our team so we can now do the analysis and optimisation ourselves. Endjin delivered beyond our expectations.