Regex Hero Blog

This feature has been on my list of "must haves" for awhile. It's simple, but very useful at times. I've added a couple buttons that allow you to step through your regex matches... As you see here the text highlighted in orange represents the currently selected match. Be sure to give it a try .

Ah yes, perceived performance: it can be such an underrated thing. I thought Regex Hero was still loading a little slow for a ~50KB application. In fact I looked at this a couple months ago and found that my initialization code was preventing the Regex Hero UI from appearing until it was done. As such, you'd actually be looking at a blank screen a little longer than you should. When talking about perceived performance, a blank screen like this is just about the worst user experience possible because in the back of the user's mind they might be thinking, "Did this application just hang?" Even if they don't think that, any kind of prolonged stillness can be perceived as slowness and that's the last thing I want. So at the time I tried a few things to correct this but couldn't find a good solution that worked well and didn't cause any other problems. Today I took another crack at it and finally solved the problem. You'll notice now that wh...

I made several changes yesterday. You'll notice that I've changed the layout a bit, moving "Generate .NET Code", "Benchmark", and now "Permalink" under Tools. Permalink is new. I've seen it plenty of times in blogs and forums and such. But the idea with Regex Hero is that it'll actually save the state of Regex Hero into a database, generate a GUID, and then return a permanent link. There's an example of that here: http://regexhero.net/tester/?id=8dc11baa-c96c-4362-9469-eecd431ebfb4 The motivation for this comes from all the questions about writing regular expressions I see all the time. These questions are asked all over the place but lately it's looking like StackOverflow is the most popular place to ask. This permalink feature could prove useful to the person asking the question, or even the person answering it. That way it becomes that much easier to see the regular expression in question and what regex options are r...

I took another hard look at Regex Hero to see if there was any way I could remove the two remaining assemblies I still had in it. I did something similar once before by removing the Linq assembly a couple months ago. But still, the Regex Hero XAP file was 170 KB and I knew these assemblies were taking up most of that. So I tried to find a way to remove the System.Windows.Controls and System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit assemblies. After all, I was using only a small fraction of their features anyway. Well I was indeed able to remove the toolkit by getting rid of the expanders and dockpanels. I found that I didn't really need them. That saved 60 KB. But I still needed the GridSplitter out of the System.Windows.Controls assembly so I wasn't willing to get rid of it. So I asked this question on StackOverflow . It seems that Microsoft released the source for all of Silverlight 2's controls. So I downloaded the source, pulled everything out necessary for the GridSpl...

So this was a stupid mistake. After I moved the tester to the "/tester" subdirectory, I removed some of the unnecessary CSS that no longer needed to be applied to the page. I didn't even think to check the site in all of the different browsers again because I hadn't done much. Apparently though I had forgotten something very important... #silverlightControlHost { height: 100%; } I needed to add that little bit of CSS back into the page. Without it Regex Hero was completely invisible to Firefox users. I am sorry about this problem. I wasn't told by anyone that there even was a problem. And I overlooked it because I rarely use Firefox. Anyway, it's solved now. This brings something else to my attention. I'd like to be contacted if there are any problems. But perhaps the GetSatisfaction thing is too much of a hurdle for some people. So I think I'll add a Contact page to the site. That way you can email me directly or use GetSatisfact...

Yeah, I guess it's getting there. The site was officially launched April 29th, 2009. Since then it's been blogged, tweeted, digged, dotnetkick-ed, del.icio.us-ed, StackOverflow-ed and made its way around the internet. In that amount of time it's had a total of 3,191 visits, a nice round number. Sorry I couldn't have blogged at more of a landmark type of number. Maybe next time I'll plan that a little better. Below is a graph (thanks to Google Analytics) of total visits from the past few months: And perhaps even more exciting, here's the ever-growing number of returning visitors over that same time period: To me the returning visitors is what it's all about. It just shows that people are indeed returning to use the online tool. Perhaps some people even come here because it has become their Regex testing tool of choice. And that's pretty awesome. To continue this progress I have a lot planned for Regex Hero in the near future. I'll ...

First and foremost, you'll notice that I've moved the tool itself to regexhero.net/tester . I've contemplated this move for awhile. On one hand, it was convenient that the home page contained the tool itself. On the other hand, it was a little slow to load for a home page, and a little off-putting for new visitors coming to the site who don't have Silverlight installed. The new home page is much smaller and faster to load to alleviate some of that first-load anxiety. The other difference is that I now have a reference page . This should be handy to pull up in a separate browser while you're using Regex Hero and need a quick regex reference . It's pretty short & sweet right now, but I will be working to improve and expand this page to become a more complete reference. As for the tool itself, I made some more improvements. I've made the auto-saving feature a little more aggressive. I was noticing cases where it wouldn't save. So when you c...