Regex Hero Blog

Today's post is not related to regular expressions at all. In fact it's not really related to Regex Hero except that it potentially affects the website. But I figure I'd write about it here anyway. I've been diagnosing some intermittent web server performance issues for awhile now. And in effort to gain some insight into which pages are slow and how often, I wrote a simple logger. The idea is to time the ASP.NET page lifecycle from start to finish, and if it exceeds a certain threshold, then log it. The advantage of this approach is that it's not going to waste processing time logging the stuff I don't care about. If you're interesting in this for yourself and you're running ASP.NET all you'd have to do is add the following to your global.asax: private Stopwatch sw; protected void Application_BeginRequest() { sw = new Stopwatch(); sw.Start(); } protected void Application_EndRequest() { sw.Stop(); if (sw.ElapsedMilliseconds ...

Bug fixes When you press the down arrow key the focus shifts to the code hinting box, but holding down the key wouldn't do anything unless you lift and press again. Now as you press and hold the down arrow key, the selection will rapidly move down the list. The code hinting box wouldn't go away when you shift focus to the target string or click in the regular expression box. Now it will. The app would throw unfriendly errors if you have disabled Isolated Storage. Now it won't. The app would throw unfriendly errors occasionally when trying to step to a match that doesn't exist. Now it won't. Improved Efficiency I've enabled output caching on the home page as well as the tester to improve ASP.NET performance, if only slightly. I've combined three separate web service calls upon initialization to only one. This will reduce the time it takes for the tester to recognize your login. UI Tweaks I've changed the placement of the code hinting popup to...

What I had suspected is now confirmed. Silverlight 4 will be launched along with Visual Studio 2010 on April 12th. If you're in the Las Vegas area you can even register for the launch event . Or you can watch it online . I've talked before about how Silverlight 4 will affect Regex Hero . So needless to say, I can hardly wait for it to 1.) be released and 2.) reach a large enough audience for me to make the switch. I'm going to be keeping an eye on riastats.com for adoption rates. UPDATE: So the official Silverlight 4 launch was broadcast live today. And I learned that in fact the actual release date will be April 15th (Thursday). UPDATE #2: Silverlight 4 is live! Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/

I was pretty proud of Regex Hero's simplicity in the beginning. But I've built Regex Hero little pieces at a time for the past year. As such, I've gone in a few different design directions and the usability has suffered a little. I'm a programmer 1st, designer 4th. That's no excuse, really. If I was a more disciplined designer I wouldn't have let this happen. But nothing in Silverlight development is final. So I sat down this weekend to solve some of these UI problems, and solve them well. My Inspiration Bill Buxton has talked about creating a common design language for an application. What he's getting at it is that the design of your application should be consistent throughout so that when you explore a new section of the application you'll instinctively know how things work. For instance, new dialog boxes, windows, and basic UI elements should always appear in a consistent, and therefore, predictable manner. Likewise, the color scheme o...