StumbleUpon Su.pr - Another way to shorten your URL

There is a new URL shortening service in town and its from StumbleUpon. Su.pr is now available publicly. So whats the difference? There are few aspects of su.pr that make it quite unique in its own way which in turn could make it interesting for some users to use. The first is that every url that gets shortened gets also submitted to Stumbleupon.

Second, Su.pr has an detailed statistics section which can provide the user traffic details about the url that has been posted. Stats includes clicks, referrers, re-tweets and reviews. And the last interesting feature is you can also schedule your posts.



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Google Apps is no longer in Beta

Starting today GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk are already graduated the Beta stage and hey are all now full-fledged members of the Google family of products. According to the product management director for Google Enterprise that the removal of the beta status means that those products have all reached unspecified internal metrics in terms of reliability and usability. Among these recently graduated Google Apps, GMail is the oldest which was launched 5 years ago.


But if you'll miss the Beta label, you can alway go back because Google launches the GMail "Back to Beta" Lab feature.



Here's a qoute from GMail blog.

How will you ever get used to using Gmail without that familiar grey "BETA" text greeting you when you log in everyday? What example will you cite the next time you make an internet joke about perpetual betas? Don't despair... for those of you long-time Gmail-ers who might feel some separation anxiety, we've got a solution. Just go to Settings, click on Labs, turn on "Back to Beta," and it'll be like Gmail never left beta at all.

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How to retrieve all installed applications using LINQ

For today's coding tip, I will show how you can retrieve information from registry using Microsoft.Win32 namespace. This namespace provides two types of classes, those that handle events raised by the operating system and those that manipulate the system registry. Our goal is to iterate through a collection of RegistryKey objects within "LocalMachine\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" to retrieve all installed applications on Windows machine.


First we must include the following namespace.

using Microsoft.Win32;

Then to retrieve all installed applications, add the following code on your main function.

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string regkey = @"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall";

            using (RegistryKey key = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(regkey))
            {
                var query = from a in
                                key.GetSubKeyNames()
                            let r = key.OpenSubKey(a)
                            select new
                            {
                                Application = r.GetValue("DisplayName")
                            };

                foreach (var item in query)
                {
                    if (item.Application != null)
                        Console.WriteLine(item.Application);
                }
            }
        }

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Free software to convert AVI to MP4 video

Just recently while looking for videos to add to my IPod collection, most of the videos I found was in AVI format so I needed the help of a AVI to MP4 converter. AVI stands for Audio Video Interleaved, one of the most popular video format used for Windows while MP4 is MPEG4, short for Moving Picture Expert Group-4. MP4 is commonly used format on iPod, iPhone, Mobile, Apple TV, PSP and etc.


The free software to convert AVI to MP4 video I found is called Convert AVI to MP4. Convert AVI to MP4, as its name says, it is one free but powerful software to convert the AVI video files to MP4 (MPEG4) video format files, not only support AVI (AVI, DivX, Xvid) video formats (.avi), but also WMA, MOV, H.264, MPEG1/MPEG2 video formats. A good feature of this software is that you don't have to worry about decoder and encoder since its already included most of the video codecs.



Here are the features of this software:

- Easy to use and user friendly interface.
- 100% compatible for Windows Vista, work fine with Windows XP, 98, 2000, 2003 Server.
- Convert video files to MP4 can be played in MP4, iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, Mobile phone, PSP, PS3, Zune, Apple TV.
- Support all popular video formats such as AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, DivX, Xvid etc to MP4.
- 100% FREE software, no adware or spyware

Here is the direct download link via [Convert AVI to MP4 website]

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How to get the difference between two DateTime values in C#

One of the most common task of programmer when dealing with DATE and TIME is to comparing its values. In .NET, you deal with it using TimeSpan class which represents a time interval that can be in days, hours, minutes or seconds. Here is an example.


The following code uses TimeSpan and subtract one DateTime from another.

DateTime Date1 = new DateTime(2009, 6, 11);
DateTime Date2 = DateTime.Now;
TimeSpan timeSpan = Date2.Subtract(Date1);

// Display the difference of the two dates up to minutes
Console.WriteLine("Days : " + timeSpan.Days.ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Hours : " + timeSpan.Hours.ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Minutes : " + timeSpan.Minutes.ToString());

// You can also retrieve Total in Hours
Console.WriteLine("Total Hours " + timeSpan.TotalHours.ToString());

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Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio 10

While browsing interesting blogs on MSDN, I stumbled upon a demonstration video from Kathleen McGrath blog that shows how to add data-bound WPF controls to an application. The video is an interview with a programming writer, McLean Schofield. You can also learn more about this topic from the MSDN documentation: Binding WPF Controls to Data in Visual Studio


This demo walk through us on how to drag items from the Data Sources window onto the WPF Designer. He also describes the XAML and code that is added behind the scenes.


*This video requires Microsoft Silverlight

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