Regex Hero Blog

I knew there was room for improvement in the auto-saving feature. So I've made some changes that make the process faster and more efficient. As I talked about last time, the synchronous saving method just had to go. So I made it asynchronous for the 3 main text boxes: regular expressions, replacement string, and the target string. Now that it's asynchronous it doesn't slow you down as you type, even if the target string is quite long. Now, isolated storage does have a limit of 1 MB. So to make good use of space I've imposed a 200,000 character saving limit on these 3 text boxes. Anything beyond that will be truncated. The other change is related to the way I auto-save the settings (checkboxes, expanders, etc). Before I was doing something which was a little bit stupid, as it turns out. I was saving these settings into an XML file in isolated storage. And to do so I had added the System.XML.Linq assembly into Silverlight. Well I found that this was unnecess...

I think this feature improves the convenience factor of Regex Hero significantly. As you use Regex Hero, your settings and regular expressions will be saved into Silverlight's isolated storage. This works much like a cookie. Next time you visit Regex Hero from the same computer all of your settings and your regular expression will be retained. The only thing I haven't done yet is apply this to the target string. Long target strings were a little too slow to save for my taste. So I'll come up with a better (asynchronous) solution for that later.