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About Planche.de

The Planche project is dedicated to developing quality software for the international fencing community. While others discuss whether transparent masks will help our sport in any way, Planche.de is taking a real and helpful step into the future by providing a new and innovative international fencing tournament solution free of cost.
This website enables you to stay in touch with the developer throughout the whole development process. That way you can suggest additional features, ask for new translations, file bug reports and stay up-to-date with the latest information.

History

Started in 1999, the Planche project was meant to develop a replacement for the DOS-based Engarde 6.x software. Some of the main goals back then were a Windows-based GUI, simplification of the common tasks and integration.

Planche 2000 was first started in late 1998 using C++ (without MFC/ATL). It had a nice tournament date planning utility that read tournament dates from the Internet.

Planche 2000 was then re-written in C++ in 1999. The software was split up into a GUI Client and the reusable COM-based Planche 2000 Engine. The Client was highly localizable, used Microsoft Agent technology for speech input/output and also featured a sophisticated Plug-in architecture for authoring of COM-based extension modules such as Import/Export wizards for EnGarde 6.x, EnGarde 7.x, PointControl and FenComp, or country-specific extensions. Separately, small programs for Windows CE and Palm OS were developed that should have been integrated with Client/Engine. GUI Clients/Servers were also started for BeOS, Linux and QNX RTP.

After one year's pause, the project has been revived in March 2002 through a complete rewrite, now called Planche 2002. The Windows software was now based on the brand-new Microsoft .NET Framework that made writing the software much easier. The successor to the Planche 2000 Engine COM library was the Fencing Object Model (FOM) .NET class library, written in C#. An NT/2k/XP Service that hosted the FOM was written in C#. The Client was written in C# using the Windows Forms architecture and was extensible through an Add-in-architecture. Arbitre for Palm OS was nearly completed.

Sadly, much of this work soon was lost, thanks to the hard drive. So in August 2003 a new version was written (again) from scratch, Planche .NET 2003. The FOM class library has now been designed interface-oriented, allowing multiple implementations. The Planche implementation of the FOM is extensible. There were now multiple clients: for the planning period, the registration and the actual tournament.

In 2004... (To be continued)

Milestones

1998

  • Refereeing tool for Handheld PC started (Windows CE 2.x, C++)

1999

  • Planche Project started by Andreas Färber
  • Planche 2000 started (Windows, C/C++)
  • Planche2000.de.vu website launched

2000

  • Planche 2000 rewritten (C++): Planche 2000 Engine and Plug-in architecture
  • Planche 2000 clients for Linux (C++/Qt), BeOS (C++) and QNX RTP (C++) started
  • Arbitre for Pocket PC (C/C++) and Palm OS (C/C++) started
  • First public demo of Planche 2000 Engine, "Alpha 0" (2000-12-24)

2001

  • (Data loss: cause unknown)

2002

  • Planche .NET 2002 (Windows, .NET) started
  • Arbitre for Palm OS continued
  • (Data loss: hard drive failure)

2003

  • Planche .NET 2003 started (August)
  • Planche.de website launched (Septembre)
  • Planche .NET 2003 renamed to Planche .NET 2004

2004

  • First Technical Preview release of Planche .NET 2004 (2004-04-16)
  • Planche .NET 2004 renamed to Planche 2010
  • First Technical Preview release of Arbitre for Series 60 (2004-09-06)
  • Arbitre for UIQ started (2004-09-12)
  • First Technical Preview release of Arbitre for Palm OS (2004-09-13)
  • First Technical Preview release of Arbitre for Pocket PC (2004-09-16)
  • First Technical Preview release of Arbitre for UIQ (2004-11-17)
  • Arbitre for Java MIDP started (2004-11-23)
  • First Technical Preview release of Arbitre for Java MIDP (2004-12-19)