--- title: "The next Regulator is gonna rock (with your help)" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/5/the-next-regulator-is-gonna-rock-with-your-help.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/5/the-next-regulator-is-gonna-rock-with-your-help.html" published: "2004-04-05T22:41:00" updated: "2004-04-05T22:41:00" tags: [".Net Original"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "I've been getting a lot of requests for new features in The Regulator . Some people want it to be able to compile the regex to an assembly, some want it to be able to do a examine-o-matic in the style of Regex Workbench…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # The next Regulator is gonna rock (with your help) By Roy Osherove April 5, 2004 In [.Net Original](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net-original) **Historical article** · Originally published April 5, 2004; technical details may be outdated. I've been getting a lot of requests for new features in [The Regulator](http://regulator.sourceforge.net/). Some people want it to be able to compile the regex to an assembly, some want it to be able to do a examine-o-matic in the style of [Regex Workbench](http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ericgu/commentview.aspx/3eaf7ed2-d76b-427a-913c-79284e11e9cd) (you get a textual description on your expression in words) and all sorts of other things. **The bad news** is that, I'm not going to add all these new features in the next version **The good news are:** \- the next version is pretty darn close (like less than a week) \- It will allow you to write plugins for The Regulator meaning:        - It should take less than 5 minutes to create either a dialog based or a dock able plug in for The Regulator        - you can add all those features you wanted but I did not supply        - the version will come with some plugins including source to serve as examples \- I will put up a list of all plugins on my site \- the best plugins will be included in the next versions of the regulator out of the box (with due credits) In short, the next version will be an almost total rewrite and refactoring version. Just how deep this will run? well, If you've worked with Regulator , yo'll remember having two panes: the web search, and snippets. in this new version they are already implemented as plugins. Totally independent of the main application. One nice thing about the plugin framework in The Regulator is that it will allow you to just drop and run new plugins. You'll just have to copy the plugin dll into the regulator directory, and on the next run it will be loaded automatically into the GUI/menus. No configuration needed. other stuff I'm working on for the next version: \- an installer \- some basic documentation (yeah I know it's really missing) \- some small enhancements (like getting the input text directly off the web and such) \- I removed the “performace“ chart for now. too much trouble, and no one was really using it... got any more feature requests? I'd love to hear them. Maybe I'll even include them in this version. ## More in .Net Original [All posts in .Net Original](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net-original) - Apr 11, 2004 ### [DotNet vs. Smalltalk](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/11/dotnet-vs-smalltalk.html) - Apr 10, 2004 ### [The Regulator 2.0 is out](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/10/the-regulator-20-is-out.html) - Apr 3, 2004 ### [Another book of the month, and what's up with ApplicationException?](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/3/another-book-of-the-month-and-whats-up-with-applicationexcep.html) - Apr 3, 2004 ### [Book of the month for April](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/3/book-of-the-month-for-april.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/