Diving Log Blog

This month, Diving Log is celebrating its 15th anniversary. 15 years is quite a long time in the computer industry and I would like to reflect the past by looking back at the history of Diving Log and how everything started. This is part 2 of 2, showing versions 3.0 – 5.0.

In 2003 Diving Log 3.0 was completed, which was the first version with direct download support for some Uwatec Aladin computers and the first import functions for Mares computers. It was a huge step forward from the manual only logging of previous versions. This version offered also multiple languages and some first export functions. Version 3.0 was an important milestone and marked the year where Diving Log started to gain popularity.

Two years later Diving Log 4.0 has been released, the first version with multiple logbook support. This version got also for the first time the report designer for printing, which allowed every user to create his own logbook designs. The logbook database format was also extended to support more data fields. Version 4.0 was the longest running Diving Log version, with 13 interim updates within 5 years until the next major version was finished in 2010. It was also the last version based on Visual Basic 6.

Because there was no automatic upgrade path from VB6 to VB.NET, I decided to rewrite Diving Log 5.0 completely from scratch in .NET. The old VB6 code of version 4.0 was also very hard to maintain, so it was a great opportunity to start over and fix all the old mistakes from the early days. It took more than a year until in spring 2010 version 5.0 was finally ready for the public. But it was worth the effort and the code is now a lot better structured, based on a modern development platform. A lot of features have been added since then and a lot more are in the pipeline – stay tuned…

• The History of Diving Log – Part 1
• Changelog (version history)
• Screenshots of version 5.0
• First blog post at the beginning of version 5.0 development

Tags: History

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2012 at 2:48 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.