atlas

as an exercise in mucking around with atlas i've started coding a search engine aggregator. the new controls does make it very easy to call webservices from javascript asynchronously, which in turn makes it easier to make the ui more responsive. i did have to get my hands dirty with javascript which i am shite at. but i managed to get a test page behaving how i'd like.

the www.asp.net site does have some useful atlas tutorials and quite a responsive forum for questions. as to the responsiveness of the site, well its very slow i do find it funny that a site to help those using new microsoft tech, built using microsoft tech can be so slow.

next step for my app is to actually return some proper results from search engines/web services.
i'll start off by parsing and displaying standard google results, which is a good excuse to finally teach myself regex. i've downloaded regexbuddy and the regulator (which seems better) to help me.

reading through a c# book at home it looks like the most performant way to use regex is to compile the regex to a separate assembly that can then be re-used within the application. that means though that writing the regex code will probably have to be a 2 step process. when coding/debugging the app use regex as normal then when testing move compile the regex out to a separate assembly, then change the calling code to execute the compiled regex.

bit of a palava, but i need to write the most performant code possible for this app, so its the price i have to pay.