History of Altaxo

From Altaxo
Revision as of 19:37, 20 February 2014 by Dlellinger (Talk | contribs)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

I wrote Altaxo as an effort to learn C#. The best way to do that is to write a nontrivial program in that language. For a long time I searched for a free Alternative to plotting programs like MathSoft Axum® or Microcal Origin®. Of course there is Gnuplot, but it's command line centric. So in 2002 I decided to learn C# by writing a plotting program.

A short 'CV' of Altaxo:

  • 2002/06: start of the development
  • 2003/03: registering at SourceForge
  • 2003/03: initial commit to a code versioning system (at this time it was really CVS!)
  • 2003/09: switch to zipped XML for saving of Altaxo documents
  • 2003/10: using the SharpDevelop workbench as Gui system
  • 2003/11: syntax highlighting and code completion in script dialogs
  • 2004/04: change of the code versioning system to Subversion
  • 2004/06: commands for chemometric data analysis (PLS, PLS2, PCR)
  • 2004/12: Multivariate regression support
  • 2005: nonlinear regression, linear algebra (thanks to the dnAnalytics project), background styles
  • 2006: MathML is used for showing fit function descriptions, clipboard operations, enhanced Gui for pens and brushes, polar plots, waterfall plots
  • 2007: plotting functions, support for texture brushes, bar graphs, density plots, transposing worksheets
  • 2008: calculation of stable distributions with very high accuracy, JCamp import
  • 2009: adding more options to text labels, refactoring of the code in order to be prepared for the transition of the Gui system from WinForms to WPF
  • 2010: organization into project folders, switching to WPF technology
  • 2011: switching to WPF completed, major enhancements to the project explorer, bulk exporter, clipboard operations between different instances of Altaxo, switching to Mercurial as version control system
  • 2012: auto-updates of Altaxo
  • 2013: complete redesign of the positioning and layer system
  • 2014: COM/OLE functionality, property bags