Built with Avalonia
Remote Access & PAM
by Devolutions
About Devolutions
Devolutions builds remote connection management and privileged access management software from Lavaltrie, Québec, serving more than a million users in over 140 countries. Their flagship product, Remote Desktop Manager, started life in 2008 on WinForms and DevExpress: eighteen years of Windows-only UI, thousands of views deep.
In August 2026, the team finished moving it all to Avalonia, view by view, in production, without pausing releases. This is the story of how they did it.
Devolutions by the numbers
2008
RDM created
1M+
Users
200+
Employees
100%
Of the Windows UI now Avalonia
Avalonia highlights
- Migrated view by view in production: no rewrite branch, no frozen releases
- Avalonia views embedded inside the existing WinForms shell, which shrank as views moved across
- From 50% to 100% of the Windows UI in under four months
- Every DevExpress component replaced, with TreeDataGrid taking on the heaviest grids
- The same Avalonia views and view models now run on Windows, macOS, and Linux
“We chose Avalonia as the foundation of our product transformation because native applications matter to us, and because we trusted the people behind it.”
David Hervieux
Founder & CEO, Devolutions
Eighteen years of Windows UI
Remote Desktop Manager began in 2008, built on WinForms and DevExpress because they were the simple, reliable choice for a Windows desktop app. Eighteen years later it had grown into Devolutions’ flagship, trusted by IT teams in over 140 countries, and the product had outgrown the platform underneath it. RDM now ships on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, and a WinForms UI can’t leave Windows: every other platform meant reimplementing UI a second time. The team needed one UI stack that could serve them all.
A migration that shipped every release
A big-bang rewrite of a codebase this size was never on the table: too much risk, too long without shipping. Instead, the team used Avalonia’s native embedding to host Avalonia views inside the existing WinForms application, then migrated thousands of views across one at a time. Users kept getting releases on schedule while the UI changed underneath them. Each migrated view retired a piece of the old stack, and the WinForms shell shrank as the Avalonia surface grew.
“We are really happy and proud to let you know that we have migrated all our Windows UI to Avalonia. ”
David Hervieux
Founder & CEO, Devolutions
From half to all of it in four months
The first half was the slow half. By late April 2026 the team announced 50% of RDM’s Windows UI converted; by 20 August it was 100%, with the patterns, themes, and custom controls built in the first half carrying the second at pace. Every DevExpress component is gone, with Avalonia’s TreeDataGrid taking over the data-heavy grids RDM is known for. What remains of WinForms is a thin host layer around the Avalonia UI, and removing it is, in the team’s words, only a matter of time.
Partnership
Backing the framework they build on
Devolutions didn’t just adopt Avalonia; they funded it. In June 2025 they committed $3 million over three years to Avalonia’s open-source development, an infrastructure investment in the framework their flagship now runs on. That sponsorship let Avalonia double its team, open-source previously paid features like Wayland support and the WebView control, and make the IDE extensions free. The improvements their migration leaned on were, in part, improvements they made possible for every Avalonia developer.
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