The last quarter of 2016 represented a major milestone for the world wide web. Globally, it was the first time there were more Internet users via mobile devices than desktops. Once upon a time, users would download and install products using the native digital doorway. That would then save the icon to your desktop for easy access anytime.

There are still millions of desktop applications on the market. By  definition, a desktop application is "any software that can be installed on a single computer (laptop or a desktop) and used to perform specific tasks."

Desktop apps don't need the web to run; an example would be Photoshop or components of the Microsoft Suite like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. If you're using PhotoShop, or AutoCAD, or Final Cut Pro, or other professional level applications, you can't just jump over to a web application.

Desktop applications are here to stay. As one writer  has aptly noted, "[B]loggers, developers and product owners can discuss the death of the desktop endlessly. But it won't make any sense until they find the solution how to implement all the desktop apps that are used by millions of people all over the world into the web."

Desktop apps are still very relevant within the enterprise and, for that reason, must be continually optimized and updated in order to prevent costly performance bottlenecks. Perhaps you've been frustrated by considerable wait times when operating your business desktop applications and don't know where to turn.

Waiting for these apps leads to inefficient workflows and lost productivity, not to mention frustrated employees.

• Understand Your Client Goals
• Build Your Testing Methodology
• Adopt the Right Testing Tools
• Where to Go from Here?

It's important to be clear about what your overall performance optimization strategy will be. Some common goals might be:

• Increase the speed of opening and closing files
• Reduce overall wait time for each client
• Increase access time to external libraries/database

Being precise about what performance goals you or your clients wishes to accomplish is the starting point for implementing a successful desktop app enhancement strategy.

Identify the User Scenarios

When working with desktop applications in a business setting, it is important to identify the various user scenarios that are causing performance issues. Some common ones might be:

1. You start the application and find that opening and closing large files slows the system down significantly.
2. You start using the application by performing basic tasks, like start the application, open a file, create a new job. All of these tasks aid in testing for bugs and memory leaks.

Once you have gained a basic understanding of the application, you should then proceed to gather more specific business scenarios from the client.

It's useful to employ screen capture technology or else video the actual user scenarios, so you can easily reproduce the specific performance issues that regularly crop up.

This avoids the need to ask the client again to reproduce the steps from the beginning.

1. Graphical User Interface Testing

2. Functional Testing

• Check for broken links
• Warning messages
• Resolution change effect on the application
• Print
• Theme change
• Installation Testing (Upgrade/Downgrade)
• Testing with multiple user accounts
• Sleep mode
• Cache

3. Platform Compatibility Testing

4. Performance Testing

• Scalability: Measure of the ability to scale up or scale down the number of user requests or ther performance measure attributes.
• Load: Process of putting demand on a system and measuring its response.
• Stress: Determines how strong a software is by testing it beyond the limits of normal operation.
• Volume: Subjecting the system to a high volume of data to test performance outcomes.

Once you've identified a testing strategy to address your desktop app performance challenges, it's time to leverage the right performance testing tools to help resolve them. There are many available on the market, but some of the ones we utilized are:

Redgate Ants Performance/Memory Profilers

This bundle offers a great tool to analyze the performance and memory usage of .NET applications:

• Measures performance bottlenecks, timing of functions, call trees, and a lot of useful information regarding performance measurement.
• Helps with defining bugs in code loops and functions.
• Ability to take snapshots of application memory, make comparisons, and analyze objects in the memory and Garbage Collector.
• Define memory leaks and identify references not collected with Garbage Collector, as well as references that are not being removed from memory.

DebugView

This is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that can be reached via TCP/IP.

• Capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don't need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate (nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs).
• Shows debugging and tracing lines without attaching the running application to Visual Studio.
• Helpful for testing changes while working on the release version of the application.

Task Parallel Library

• TPL is a set of public types and APIs in the System. Threading and System.Threading.Tasks namespaces. The purpose of the TPL is to make developers more productive by simplifying the process of adding parallelism and concurrency to applications.
• Scales the degree of concurrency dynamically to most efficiently use all the processors that are available.
• Handles the partitioning of the work, the scheduling of threads on the ThreadPool, cancellation support, state management, and other low-level details.
• Maximizes the performance of your code while focusing on the work your program is designed to accomplish.