History of Altaxo

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
2015: Altaxo is going 3D
2016: Refine the 3D graphs
2017: Update to .NET framework 4.6 and use Roslyn as C# compiler
2018: Markdown text, complete reorganization of the underlying architecture, separate from SharpDevelop
2019: Add export of Markdown to OpenXML (.docx files)
2020: Add nullability awareness to the source code
2021: Switch to Vortice library and DirectX11 for 3D plotting, add many new fitting functions
2022: Integration of MathNet.Numerics into Altaxo’s core library, spectral processing