In the course of some of my MCMS 2002 projects, I’ve noticed how powerful and helpful regular expressions can be. One such case is when you’re working on a navigation component. You could walk the channel tree to find specific points within your site structure, checking against the path of the channel etc, or you could use regular expressions to do the checks for you.
When used correctly, they can have a very positive impact on your project. In one recent project, I was shocked to see the performance impact of going from a “channel tree walker” to regular expressions. The original “channel walker” solution used ASP.NET caching and the regular expression solution (which didn’t use any type of caching) was dramatically faster.
I’ve written up an article explaining how you can use regular expressions in your MCMS project. In this article I reference the above mentioned project and show screenshots of the regular expressions in action!