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Regex Hero Embraces MVC, OpenID, and Cloud Computing

You may have noticed that there haven't been any updates for awhile. Well, I've been working on this update for the past three weekends. It was a big one.

First, I completely rewrote the site from scratch. I went from ASP.NET Web Forms in VB.NET to ASP.NET MVC in C#. I did it for the learning experience, but I also did it because I wanted the added control that MVC gives me. I like the fact that I was finally able to rid the site of all viewstate information. And I also like the way that URL's and forms are handled in MVC.

Second, I built an OpenID login/registration system. I believe OpenID is finally at the point now where it's easy enough to use, and you don't even have to completely understand how OpenID works to use it. In the past registration forms asked you for your OpenID URL which of course most people don't know. But now you can simply click a logo to log in. You can log in here to see what I mean. I used the excellent DotNetOpenID project to help me out which includes a version of the OpenID selector.

Third, I added these buttons to the Regex Hero tool which every logged in user will see:
Save and open buttons

This is the cloud computing part of the update. These save and open buttons will allow you to save or open your own regular expressions along with all of the associated regex options and settings. Instead of saving your regular expressions to your computer, the regular expressions are stored in the Regex Hero database. It's like saving your regular expressions in a "cloud" that you can access from anywhere.
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