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Silverlight 4 Coming in April, or Maybe Sooner

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 ridiculously wide sections of text not scrolling properly with the highlighting. Secondly, I believe I'll finally be able to enable word wrapping and still have working highlighting.

Right-click support and custom context menus
Finally, I'll be able to create context menus with Cut, Copy, & Paste for the textboxes in the application.

Mouse wheel support
Oh yes, you'll be able to use the mouse wheel to scroll the text boxes.

Improved XAML parser
This should improve the start-up time of Regex Hero, if only marginally.

Like I said, there's much more in this release but these are the things I'm looking forward to most.

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