Giving Away the First 100 User Licenses

UPDATE: Thank you everyone for participating. I've given away 105 licenses. Read more.

So I'm getting ready to sell Regex Hero. It will be priced at $15 per user license. But before I do, I'm giving away the first 100 copies for free. I figure the easiest way to handle this is to give away copies to the first 100 users who create an account on the site. If you haven't already done so, you can create an account now to ensure you get your free copy. As a registered user you'll also gain the ability to save & open your own regular expressions in the Regex Hero database. As I'm writing this, there are 12 users already signed up.

Most of the applications I've created over the years I've simply given away for free. So it is a new and unfamiliar experience to sell Regex Hero. It is so different that I wasn't comfortable to completely deny people the ability to use it for free. So in fact even after it goes on sale Regex Hero will have a nag box for non-paying users that will appear every 5 minutes. You can dismiss this dialog box as many times as you'd like and continue using the tool. This way if you're someone who doesn't use Regex Hero often enough to justify the $15 expense, then you don't have to buy it.

Of course, I'm also providing free upgrades for life. In other words, if you do buy it you won't have to pay again a year later to upgrade to "version 2.0". This is perhaps a bit extreme, but as a guy who hates paying for frequent software upgrades I thought this would be a welcomed change.

Reference and More

I took the time this weekend to update the syntax reference with the remaining sections that were still missing. I still need to create a lot more examples, but at least the syntax with descriptions are complete.

I then grabbed that completed reference and added it to Regex Hero :


Initially my plan was to create a static modal dialog box with the reference in it. But a fellow user of Regex Hero suggested doing it this way so a thanks goes to him. I think it works quite well.

To save myself time I actually used Regex Hero to parse the reference. I separated each regular expression from the description by grouping which then allowed me to build my XAML much faster. It's kind of ironic using Regex Hero to build Regex Hero but if it speeds up redundant tasks then I'm all for it. In fact, I've used Regex Hero a lot lately to help me with redundant code. I'll try to make a video example of that some day soon.

While I was doing all of this I also refactored a good portion of the project. I broke things out into user controls that now load asynchronously when you see the loading screen come up. This may again improve perceived performance, if only marginally. But it also makes the project easier to manage from my perspective.

I then made a few minor UI improvements:

1.) I improved the undo/redo functionality. In the past it would add the initial regular expression, "^Regex Hero" to the undo history. I don't know if I'd call it a bug, but I think it was always an annoying feature. Well I've fixed that by clearing the undo history after your last regular expression is loaded. Then I also set it to clear the undo history any time you open a saved regular expression from your library.

2.) I created a more powerful ListBox control that I'm now using in both the ".NET Regex Reference" and "Open Regular Expression" dialogs. You'll notice now that you can select an item by double-clicking it, or even by hitting enter or space bar. And of course as a last option I've left the Open button in place for those who like to use the mouse. I figure this should cover the most common user habits and I think keyboard users should find it much quicker and easier to use.