Regular Expression Tools

As I develop, it seems I am using regular expressions more and more. So, I am always on the lookout for a good tool to help me edit and verify my expressions.

I used to use an online tool called the Regex .NET Tester, but recently I have found a rich thick client called The Regulator. This is a free advanced regular expression editor written by Roy Osherove.

Roy has also written a regular expression creation tool for beginners called Regulazy. I haven't tried this one, but it looks like it might be a good learning tool.

In addition to the tools above I find that a good regular expression cheet sheet comes in useful every once in a while. There are two good cheet sheets located at the RegExLib and Visibone websites.

Free MSDN Library

It appears Microsoft has opened up the MSDN Library to the public!

This is great news for those that don't have the ability or desire to fork over the money required for a MSDN subscription.

The MSDN Library May 2006 Edition is currently available. Future editions will also be available when they are released.

Web Developer Toolbars

I have found the following developer toolbars invaluable during web development. Some of them you might be aware of alreay, but some of them might be new to you.

Internet Explorer

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar


• Web Development Helper

Firefox

• Web Developer


• XML Developer Toolbar

Google Firefox Synchronizer

For those of you who use Firefox on multiple machines and you get tired of getting out of synch with your bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history, and tabs then Google has a solution for you...

The Google Firefox Synchronizer.

C# Programming Tools

Check out these great C# Programming Tools! I knew about some of them, but there are many that I didn't even know existed and many of them are open source!

"The C# Team has scoured the Web for other implementations of the CLI, cool object browsers, IDE tricks, add-ins, obfuscators, and other useful tools and utilities that will help you get your job done faster."

ASP.NET Analyzer & Guidance

I ran across these free ASP.NET tools and thought I'd share them with you...

The Best Practice Analyzer for ASP.NET (alpha release)

"...is a tool that scans the configuration of an ASP.NET 2.0 application. The tool can scan against three mainline scenarios (hosted environment, production environment, or development environment) and identify problematic configuration settings in the machine.config or web.config files associated with your ASP.NET application. This is an alpha release intended to gain feedback on the tool and the configuration rules included with it."

The Patterns and Practices Guidance Explorer

"...is a tool to find and use relevant patterns & practices guidance. Guidance Explorer installs with a guidance library including performance and security topics for .NET and ASP.NET applications. The guidance library contains checklists and guidelines covering design, implementation and deployment topics. The tool and the library will evolve over time to include additional types of guidance."

To see the "Patterns and Practices Guidance Explorer" in action check out ScotGu's Blog entry about it.

Got API?

For those of you who do web UI development I ran across an online API tool (for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XSL, XPath, etc…) and thought it looked very useful, especially since it pulls from some of the sites I frequent anyway ( w3schools & MSDN ).

There seems to be plans to expand the site to include other technologies as well.

The site is http://www.gotapi.com/