A Plethora of Updates to the Site and the Tool

First and foremost, you'll notice that I've moved the tool itself to regexhero.net/tester. I've contemplated this move for awhile. On one hand, it was convenient that the home page contained the tool itself. On the other hand, it was a little slow to load for a home page, and a little off-putting for new visitors coming to the site who don't have Silverlight installed. The new home page is much smaller and faster to load to alleviate some of that first-load anxiety.

The other difference is that I now have a reference page. This should be handy to pull up in a separate browser while you're using Regex Hero and need a quick regex reference. It's pretty short & sweet right now, but I will be working to improve and expand this page to become a more complete reference.

As for the tool itself, I made some more improvements. I've made the auto-saving feature a little more aggressive. I was noticing cases where it wouldn't save. So when you close the tool and bring it back up again you lose what you were working on. I think I resolved that.

And then I've added a couple buttons to the top-right corner of the tool. You'll notice the "Generate Code" and "Full Screen" buttons. The Full Screen button is obvious -- it'll toggle full-screen mode. The Generate Code button is a more useful feature for those writing .NET applications. It'll actually generate a .NET snippet of code based on your regular expression, target string, options, and settings. Then you can copy & paste that code into your own application.

Some News and a New Feature

So I'll talk about the feature first. You may have noticed it. It's just a tall gray button along the side of the tool that you can click to collapse & expand the options menu. It can be useful when you're looking for a larger workspace. Plus it's fun to play with. I was motivated to add this because several weeks ago Steve Smith from RegexLib.com added Regex Hero to his site. I thought it looked a little cramped for space inside the page layout, so the ability to collapse the options menu has greatly improved this.

In other news, Silverlight 3 has been released. There are some cool features that Microsoft has added that will be soon making its way into Regex Hero. The most profound of which will be out-of-browser capabilities. This will mean that soon you'll have the choice to run Regex Hero from the site, or from your desktop.