Regex Tester Extension for Visual Studio 2010

I recently ran out of a trial version of the RegexBuddy regular expression editor . We have everything strictly with licenses, and I immediately deleted this program. Comrades advised to try online editors in particular RegExr , I did not like it and I found another RegexHero .

But somehow, the network did not work for us temporarily, and then I decided to write a small utility for parsing text using regular expressions, created a WPF application, and to parse the text I used the well-known class Regex , and after half an hour I used the first version this utility. Then within two weeks I finished it as necessary and catching small bugs :). After the weekend at work, he shared with colleagues, but everyone perceived another utility without comments, which needs to be copied or run over the network, except for one older (not by age) comrade, who said it would be nice to do it as an extension for Visual Studio 2010 And I started thinking about implementing my extension ...

Creating an extension

I have already heard and read that making plugins for VS 2010 is easy. But I decided that I would first bring the utility to my mind in its current form, and then I will transfer it, another week has passed and I was ready. From the beginning, I downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 SDK , then I read a little on www.codeproject.com who both created the extensions and of course read the MSDN.

I decided to use the project type “Visual Studio Package”, which was just in line with my expectations of easy porting. When creating a project, a simple and clear Wizard opened, in which I chose to add the “Tool Window” functionality, I removed the projects for testing, as I have a simple utility.
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After creation the project opened:


I was immediately delighted as soon as I saw the XAML and quickly copied the GUI from my WPF application and its CS part and form was displayed in the designer, I pressed F5 and an experimental studio opened where I could check my extension found in View -> Other Windows - > Regex Test . As a result, it worked absolutely identical:



When selecting from 9 proposed positioning options, I like the center most, i.e. in the form of a normal tab.

I used the extension I created during 1 week and additionally did:
- processing in the background thread, the extension window becomes inactive during processing.
- made a combination of hot keys (for documentation ) to quickly open the utility window by Shift + Alt + R , the only one that was not taken from the right ones :)
- drew an icon and made a preview image for the extension
- filled in source.extension.vsixmanifest in the project, which opens in a convenient designer.

And the extension for Visual Studio 2010 is ready, just called it: Regex Tester .

Features:

I can distinguish two features (features):
- From the bottom right there is a slider for resizing fonts for the entire extension.
- When using the Match mode, you can optionally set the output format.
For example, using reg.expressions, you output a list of cities that you need to insert into XML as elements. Here is a screenshot of the expansion interface in VS 2010 with the example described.



I would be very happy if this extension will be useful to someone, use it for health!
Thank you all for your attention!