Regex Hero Blog

You may have noticed that there haven't been any updates for awhile. Well, I've been working on this update for the past three weekends. It was a big one. First, I completely rewrote the site from scratch. I went from ASP.NET Web Forms in VB.NET to ASP.NET MVC in C#. I did it for the learning experience, but I also did it because I wanted the added control that MVC gives me. I like the fact that I was finally able to rid the site of all viewstate information. And I also like the way that URL's and forms are handled in MVC . Second, I built an OpenID login/registration system. I believe OpenID is finally at the point now where it's easy enough to use, and you don't even have to completely understand how OpenID works to use it. In the past registration forms asked you for your OpenID URL which of course most people don't know. But now you can simply click a logo to log in. You can log in here to see what I mean. I used the excellent DotNetOpenID ...

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 ...