Regex Hero Blog

It's been a long time in the making but code hinting is here, and I'm pretty excited about it. I've created a short code hinting demo that shows it off a bit. This feature is available only to licensed users . If you're a licensed user and you open up the tester now you'll see hints appear as you start typing an open parenthesis "(", bracket "[" or brace "{". I took a lot of inspiration from Intellisense. In particular, I based my design off of the Intellisense in Expression Blend. I like the look & feel of Expression Blend. But the regular expression language is so different than anything Intellisense is used for. So functionality-wise I was on my own. I knew one thing I didn't want. I didn't want the code hinting to aggressively autocomplete. In other words, Intellisense in Visual Studio will sometimes autocomplete whatever you're typing at the time, sometimes adding code that you don't even want...

When the site was hosted with Orcs Web they would backup the server for me as a part of their managed hosting. Now that I'm with Liquid Web and I've opted not to use their $100/month Guardian backup service, backups are on me. So today I set up a database backup maintenance plan. Every night the server will create full backups for every database in SQL and save the backups to the extra (backup) hard drive in the server. I've got the backups configured to expire after 14 days. Essentially what this means is that I'll have quick restore capability for any day up to 2 weeks in the past. But that's really not enough. So in addition to this I've signed up for MozyPro off-site backup. I've used MozyHome on my home computer for the past year and I've been pleased with their service. The MozyPro service is slightly more expensive than MozyHome. But MozyHome will not run on a server, so MozyPro it is. I configured MozyPro to backup nightly just a...

I haven't heard much feedback on my code hinting post in January, perhaps because the first demo is not too impressive. And in fact I haven't been able to work on it as much as I wanted. But I'm still thinking about it and planning the user interface. There's still a lot to do to make this as well polished as Intellisense is in Visual Studio or Expression Blend. In fact I'm drawing more inspiration from the Expression Blend interface, but that's another story. When I first started on this I knew that I needed to parse the regular expression on the fly and display the hints based on the text next to the caret. I begun by researching parsing theory. Now, I know what you're thinking. Why bother? Why not just use regular expressions? Well, I knew that regular expressions are ill-suited to parse HTML , and I thought that they may not be the best choice for parsing themselves, either. The reason I thought this, it turns out, was completely valid. Reg...

The exact release date has not been announced. But Visual Studio 2010 RTM is coming out in April and I think it's safe to assume that Silverlight 4 will be released no later than that. Each release of Silverlight has brought massive improvements over the previous version. And once again, Silverlight 4 does not disappoint. There is a long list of improvements but the ones that I think that will affect Regex Hero are as follows: RichTextBox My plan is to use this in place of all 4 major textboxes in Regex Hero. The new RichTextBox has built-in multiple undos & redos, so I can ditch my home-brewed code. It should be nice to use for syntax highlighting for the regular expressions I intend to create. It also has a built-in API to determine the pixel position of the text. I should be able to use this API and build a new highlighting scheme based off of it. This should do a couple things. First, I should be able to finally fix the problem I had with the ScrollViewer and ...

There was a bug in the C# code generation involving improperly escaped quotes. I'm using the string literal syntax with the @ sign. And when you do that, quotes are no longer escaped with \". Instead, it works more like VB with double quotes "" where the first quote escapes the second. I overlooked this but a fellow user of Regex Hero pointed this out to me today (thanks Jason). And after a small code change it works properly now. Secondly, I made a small improvement to the universal match count / group count / stepper control in Regex Hero. The up/down buttons will normally select a match and scroll to it. But when there's only 1 match, then the up/down buttons are disabled. So in the event that there's only 1 match you can now click the text that says "1 match" and that will select and scroll to the match. It's a simple change but I think it helps.