Skip to main content

Silverlight 4 Adoption Rate at 75%, Regex Hero Update in the Works

I blogged awhile back about the Silverlight 4 adoption rate on the Regex Hero site. Naturally the figures on the site are a little higher than the worldwide averages.

But at this point Silverlight 4 has overtaken Silverlight 3 by a healthy margin. In fact Silverlight 4 is at a 75% overall adoption rate as collected by my Google Analytics profile this past week...
Silverlight 4 adoption rate

My plan was to launch a new version of Regex Hero after Silverlight 4 surpasses the 80% mark. And things are looking good. In my own testing with Silverlight 4 the instant improvement was the function of the mouse wheel. I didn't have to change a thing to make this happen. After I set Regex Hero to target Silverlight 4 all the textboxes were scrollable with the mouse wheel. I'm also working on the right-click context menus for cut/copy/paste, and undo/redo. If all goes well I'll release a new version next week with these improvements.

Meanwhile I'm also working on incorporating the more powerful RichTextBox control to see what kind of benefits in performance and functionality it might give me. At this point it's still an experimental process for me. It's a big underlying change to the application that'll require substantial testing prior to release. As such this upgrade (if it proves successful) is still weeks away.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Regex Hero for Windows 10 is Underway

Awhile back I began working on an HTML5 / JavaScript version of Regex Hero . However, it was a huge undertaking essentially requiring a complete rewrite of the entire application. I have not had enough time to dedicate to this lately. So I've begun again, this time rewriting Regex Hero to work in WPF. It'll be usable in Windows 10 and downloadable from the Microsoft Store. This is a much easier task that also has the advantage of running the .NET regex library from the application itself. This will allow for the same speedy experience of testing your regular expressions and getting instant feedback that Regex Hero users have always enjoyed. I expect the first release to be ready in Q4 of 2019.

Optimizing Your Regular Expressions

Regular expressions will backtrack.  That's an unfortunate thing about them because backtracking can be slow.    And in certain (rare) cases the performance can become so awful that executing the regular expression against a relatively short string could take over a minute.  There's a good article about catastrophic backtracking over at regular-expressions.info . And today I created a video about all of this called  Regex Lesson 5: Optimization .  In the video I start with a very poorly written regular expression and make several improvements to it, using the benchmarking feature along the way.  By the end of the video I make the regular expression over 3 million times faster. In addition, today's update to Regex Hero provides a little message in the event that you encounter a regular expression that takes over 10 seconds to evaluate... And then last of all, I changed the benchmarking feature a bit.  In the past it would simply test your regular expression against

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