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• What is the value in hiding the details through abstractions? Isn't there value in transparency?

  - by user606723

  Background I am not a big fan of abstraction. I will admit that one can benefit from adaptability, portability and re-usability of interfaces etc. There is real benefit there, and I don't wish to question that, so let's ignore it. There is the other major "benefit" of abstraction, which is to hide implementation logic and details from users of this abstraction. The argument is that you don't need to know the details, and that one should concentrate on their own logic at this point. Makes sense in theory. However, whenever I've been maintaining large enterprise applications, I always need to know more details. It becomes a huge hassle digging deeper and deeper into the abstraction at every turn just to find out exactly what something does; i.e. having to do "open declaration" about 12 times before finding the stored procedure used. This 'hide the details' mentality seems to just get in the way. I'm always wishing for more transparent interfaces and less abstraction. I can read high level source code and know what it does, but I'll never know how it does it, when how it does it, is what I really need to know. What's going on here? Has every system I've ever worked on just been badly designed (from this perspective at least)? My philosophy When I develop software, I feel like I try to follow a philosophy I feel is closely related to the ArchLinux philosophy: Arch Linux retains the inherent complexities of a GNU/Linux system, while keeping them well organized and transparent. Arch Linux developers and users believe that trying to hide the complexities of a system actually results in an even more complex system, and is therefore to be avoided. And therefore, I never try to hide complexity of my software behind abstraction layers. I try to abuse abstraction, not become a slave to it. Question at heart Is there real value in hiding the details? Aren't we sacrificing transparency? Isn't this transparency valuable?

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• Best practice with branching source code and application lifecycle

  - by Toni Frankola

  We are a small ISV shop and we usually ship a new version of our products every month. We use Subversion as our code repository and Visual Studio 2010 as our IDE. I am aware a lot of people are advocating Mercurial and other distributed source control systems but at this point I do not see how we could benefit from these, but I might be wrong. Our main problem is how to keep branches and main trunk in sync. Here is how we do things today: Release new version (automatically create a tag in Subversion) Continue working on the main trunk that will be released next month And the cycle repeats every month and works perfectly. The problem arises when an urgent service release needs to be released. We cannot release it from the main trunk (2) as it is under heavy development and it is not stable enough to be released urgently. In such case we do the following: Create a branch from the tag we created in step (1) Bug fix Test and release Push the change back to main trunk (if applicable) Our biggest problem is merging these two (branch with main). In most cases we cannot rely on automatic merging because e.g.: a lot of changes has been made to main trunk merging complex files (like Visual Studio XML files etc.) does not work very well another developer / team made changes you do not understand and you cannot just merge it So what you think is the best practice to keep these two different versions (branch and main) in sync. What do you do?

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• What should we tell our unsupported IE6 users?

  - by Dan Fabulich

  In the upcoming version of our web app, we've broken IE6, and we don't intend to fix it. We've had a clear warning posted for IE6 users for some months; we've decided it's time not to support it. My question is: how should we communicate this to our users? Some people here feel that we should block IE6 users who would try to access the web app, because it's not going to work for them. Others feel that we should just leave up a warning, saying "This doesn't work in IE6," but not block them; instead, if they click to dismiss the warning, just let them in to the broken site to see for themselves that it doesn't work. Who is right? Is there a better way?

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• Can You Have "Empty" Abstract/Classes?

  - by ShrimpCrackers

  Of course you can, I'm just wondering if it's rational to design in such a way. I'm making a breakout clone and was doing some class design. I wanted to use inheritance, even though I don't have to, to apply what I've learned in C++. I was thinking about class design and came up with something like this: GameObject - base class (consists of data members like x and y offsets, and a vector of SDL_Surface* MovableObject : GameObject - abstract class + derived class of GameObject (one method void move() = 0; ) NonMovableObject : GameObject - empty class...no methods or data members other than constructor and destructor(at least for now?). Later I was planning to derive a class from NonMovableObject, like Tileset : NonMovableObject. I was just wondering if "empty" abstract classes or just empty classes are often used...I notice that the way I'm doing this, I'm just creating the class NonMovableObject just for sake of categorization. I know I'm overthinking things just to make a breakout clone, but my focus is less on the game and more on using inheritance and designing some sort of game framework.

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• Any tips for designing the invoicing/payment system of a SaaS?

  - by Alexandru Trandafir Catalin

  The SaaS is for real estate companies, and they can pay a monthly fee that will offer them 1000 publications but they can also consume additional publications or other services that will appear on their bill as extras. On registration the user can choose one of the 5 available plans that the only difference will be the quantity of publications their plan allows them to make. But they can pass that limit if they wish, and additional payment will be required on the next bill. A publication means: Publishing a property during one day, for 1 whole month would be: 30 publications. And 5 properties during one day would be 5 publications. So basically the user can: Make publications (already paid in the monthly fee, extra payment only if it passes the limit) Highlight that publication (extra payment) Publish on other websites or printed catalogues (extra payment) Doubts: How to handle modifications in pricing plans? Let's say quantities change, or you want to offer some free stuff. How to handle unpaid invoices? I mean, freeze the service until the payment has been done and then resume it. When to make the invoices? The idea is to make one invoice for the monthly fee and a second invoice for the extra services that were consumed. What payment methods to use? The choosen now is by bank account, and mobile phone validation with a SMS. If user doesn't pay we call that phone and ask for payment. Any examples on billing online services will be welcome! Thanks!

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• Sub routing in a SPA site

  - by Anders

  I have a SPA site that I'm working on, I have a requirement that you can have subroutes for a page view model. Im currently using this 'pattern' for the site MyApp.FooViewModel = MyApp.define({ meta: { query: MyApp.Core.Contracts.Queries.FooQuery, title: "Foo" }, init: function (queryResult) { }, prototype: { } }); In the master view model I have a route table this.navigation(new MyApp.RoutesViewModel({ Home: { model: MyApp.HomeViewModel, route: String.empty }, Foo: { model: MyApp.FooViewModel } })); The meta object defines which query should populate the top level view model when its invoked through sammyjs, this is all fine but it does not support sub routing My plan is to change the meta object so that it can (optional offcourse) look like this meta: { query: MyApp.Core.Contracts.Queries.FooQuery, title: "Foo", route: { barId: MyApp.BarViewModel } } When sammyjs detects a barId in the query string the Barmodel will be executed and populated through its own meta object. Is this a good design?

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• Good approach for hundreds of comsumers and big files

  - by ????? ???????

  I have several files (nearly 1GB each) with data. Data is a string line. I need to process each of these files with several hundreds of consumers. Each of these consumers does some processing that differs from others. Consumers do not write anywhere concurrently. They only need input string. After processing they update their local buffers. Consumers can easily be executed in parallel. Important: With one specific file each consumer has to process all lines (without skipping) in correct order (as they appear in file). The order of processing different files doesn't matter. Processing of a single line by one consumer is comparably fast. I expect less than 50 microseconds on Corei5. So now I'm looking for the good approach to this problem. This is going to be be a part of a .NET project, so please let's stick with .NET only (C# is preferable). I know about TPL and DataFlow. I guess that the most relevant would be BroadcastBlock. But i think that the problem here is that with each line I'll have to wait for all consumers to finish in order to post the new one. I guess that it would be not very efficient. I think that ideally situation would be something like this: One thread reads from file and writes to the buffer. Each consumer, when it is ready, reads the line from the buffer concurrently and processes it. The entry from the buffer shouldn't be deleted as one consumer reads it. It can be deleted only when all consumers have processed it. TPL schedules consumer threads itself. If one consumer outperforms the others, it shouldn't wait and can read more recent entries from the buffer. Am i right with this kind of approach? Whether yes or not, how can i implement the good solution? A bit was already discussed on StackOverflow: link

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• How to design a scalable notification system?

  - by Trent

  I need to write a notification system manager. Here is my requirements: I need to be able to send a Notification on different platforms, which may be totally different (for exemple, I need to be able to send either an SMS or an E-mail). Sometimes the notification may be the same for all recipients for a given platform, but sometimes it may be a notification per recipients (or several) per platform. Each notification can contain platform specific payload (for exemple an MMS can contains a sound or an image). The system need to be scalable, I need to be able to send a very large amount of notification without crashing either the application or the server. It is a two step process, first a customer may type a message and choose a platform to send to, and the notification(s) should be created to be processed either real-time either later. Then the system needs to send the notification to the platform provider. For now, I end up with some though but I don't know how scalable it will be or if it is a good design. I've though of the following objects (in a pseudo language): a generic Notification object: class Notification { String $message; Payload $payload; Collection<Recipient> $recipients; } The problem with the following objects is what if I've 1.000.000 recipients ? Even if the Recipient object is very small, it'll take too much memory. I could also create one Notification per recipient, but some platform providers requires me to send it in batch, meaning I need to define one Notification with several Recipients. Each created notification could be stored in a persistent storage like a DB or Redis. Would it be a good it to aggregate this later to make sure it is scalable? On the second step, I need to process this notification. But how could I distinguish the notification to the right platform provider? Should I use an object like MMSNotification extending an abstract Notification? or something like Notification.setType('MMS')? To allow to process a lot of notification at the same time, I think a messaging queue system like RabbitMQ may be the right tool. Is it? It would allow me to queue a lot of notification and have several worker to pop notification and process them. But what if I need to batch the recipients as seen above? Then I imagine a NotificationProcessor object for which I could I add NotificationHandler each NotificationHandler would be in charge to connect the platform provider and perform notification. I can also use an EventManager to allow pluggable behavior. Any feedbacks or ideas? Thanks for giving your time. Note: I'm used to work in PHP and it is likely the language of my choice.

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• Are there any companies using BDD in a .NET environment?

  - by Nick

  I've seen BDD in action (in this case using SpecFlow and Selenium in a .NET environment) for a small test project. I was very impressed - mainly due to the fact that the language used to specify the acceptance tests meant they engaged with the product owner much more easily. I'm now keen to bring this into my current organisation. However I'm asked 'who else uses this?' and 'show me some case-studies'. Unfortunately I cannot find any 'big names' (or even 'small names' for that matter!) of companies who are actively using BDD. I have two questions really: Is BDD adopted by companies out there? Who are they? How can BDD be implemented in an agile .NET environment and are there any significant drawbacks to doing it?

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• Shuffling algorithm with no "self-mapping"?

  - by OregonTrail

  To randomly shuffle an array, with no bias towards any particular permutation, there is the Knuth Fischer-Yeats algorithm. In Python: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys from random import randrange def KFYShuffle(items): i = len(items) - 1 while i > 0: j = randrange(i+1) # 0 <= j <= i items[j], items[i] = items[i], items[j] i = i - 1 return items print KFYShuffle(range(int(sys.argv[1]))) There is also Sattolo's algorithm, which produces random cycles. In Python: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys from random import randrange def SattoloShuffle(items): i = len(items) while i > 1: i = i - 1 j = randrange(i) # 0 <= j <= i-1 items[j], items[i] = items[i], items[j] return items print SattoloShuffle(range(int(sys.argv[1]))) I'm currently writing a simulation with the following specifications for a shuffling algorithm: The algorithm is unbiased. If a true random number generator was used, no permutation would be more likely than any other. No number ends up at its original index. The input to the shuffle will always be A[i] = i for i from 0 to N-1 Permutations are produced that are not cycles, but still meet specification 2. The cycles produced by Sattolo's algorithm meet specification 2, but not specification 1 or 3. I've been working at creating an algorithm that meets these specifications, what I came up with was equivalent to Sattolo's algorithm. Does anyone have an algorithm for this problem?

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• Functional programming and stateful algorithms

  - by bigstones

  I'm learning functional programming with Haskell. In the meantime I'm studying Automata theory and as the two seem to fit well together I'm writing a small library to play with automata. Here's the problem that made me ask the question. While studying a way to evaluate a state's reachability I got the idea that a simple recursive algorithm would be quite inefficient, because some paths might share some states and I might end up evaluating them more than once. For example, here, evaluating reachability of g from a, I'd have to exclude f both while checking the path through d and c: So my idea is that an algorithm working in parallel on many paths and updating a shared record of excluded states might be great, but that's too much for me. I've seen that in some simple recursion cases one can pass state as an argument, and that's what I have to do here, because I pass forward the list of states I've gone through to avoid loops. But is there a way to pass that list also backwards, like returning it in a tuple together with the boolean result of my canReach function? (although this feels a bit forced) Besides the validity of my example case, what other techniques are available to solve this kind of problems? I feel like these must be common enough that there have to be solutions like what happens with fold* or map. So far, reading learnyouahaskell.com I didn't find any, but consider I haven't touched monads yet. (if interested, I posted my code on codereview)

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• What would you do to improve the working of a small Development team?

  - by Omar Kooheji

  My company is having a reshuffle and I'm applying for my boss' job as he's moved up the ladder. The new role would give me a chance to move our development team into the 21st century and I'd like to make sure that: I can provide sensible suggestions in the interview to get the job so I can fix the team If I get the job I can actually enact some changes to actually improve the lives of the developers and their output. I want to know what I can suggest to improve the way we work, because I think it's a mess but every time I've suggested a change it's been shot down because any time spend implementing the change would be time that isn't spent developing software. Here is the state of play at the moment: My team consists of 3-4 developers (Mainly Java but I do some .Net work) Each member of the team is usually works on 2-3 projects at a time We are each responsible for the entire life cycle of the project from design to testing. Usually only one person works on a project (Although we have the odd project that will have more than one person working on it.) Projects tend to be bespoke to single customer, or are really heavilly reliant on a particular customer environment. We have 2-3 "Products" which we evolve to meet customer requirements. We use SVN for source control We don't do continuous integration (I'd like to start) We use a really basic bug tracker for internal issue tracking (I'd like to move to an issue/task management system) Any changes that bring a sudden dip in revenue generation will probably be rejected, the company isn't structured for development most of the rest of the technical team's jobs can be broken down to install this piece of hardware, configure that piece of hardware and once a job is done it's done and you never have to look at it again. This mentality has crept into development team because it's part of the company culture.

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• Starting off with web dev with php

  - by pavan kumar

  I'm currently working with Java / C++. I'm interested in web development and am planning to shift my stream. I heard that PHP is a good platform to start off and also it does not require that much of knowledge in technologies like JSP / Servlets or frameworks like springs / struts / hibernate. I have basic ideas about HTML and Javascript as well. I have gone through previous posts in SO and found out the relevant resources as well: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/the-best-way-to-learn-php/ http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-1028265.html http://www.killerphp.com/ http://phpforms.net/tutorial/tutorial.html http://www.php5-tutorial.com/ etc. Now, my question is: I heard of PHP frameworks like CodeIgniter, Zend Frameworkd and Yii. Doesn't learning PHP & MySql implicitly makes us aware of these frameworks? Am I making a good choice in stating with PHP? Is it a good idea to shift streams?

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• Why is there never any controversy regarding the switch statement? [closed]

  - by Nick Rosencrantz

  We all know that the gotostatement should only be used on very rare occasions if at all. It has been discouraged to use the goto statement countless places countless times. But why it there never anything like that about the switch statement? I can understand the position that the switch statement should always be avoided since anything with switch can always be expressed by if...else... which is also more readable and the syntax of the switch statement if difficult to remember. Do you agree? What are the arguments in favor of keeping the 'switch` statement? It can also be difficult to use if what you're testing changes from say an integer to an object, then C++ or Java won't be able to perform the switch and neither C can perform switch on something like a struct or a union. And the technique of fall-through is so very rarely used that I wonder why it was never presented any regret of having switch at all? The only place I know where it is best practice is GUI code and even that switch is probably better coded in a more object-oriented way.

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• What kind of specific projects can I do to master bitwise operations in C++? Also is there a canonical book? [closed]

  - by Ford

  I don't use C++ or bitwise operations at my current job but I'm thinking of applying to companies where it is a requirement to be fluent with them (on their tests anyway). So my question is: Can anyone suggest a project which will require gaining a fluency in bitwise operations to complete? On a side note, is there a canonical book on optimization techniques using bitwise operations since that seems to be an important use of them?

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• Student wanting to go to a developer conference

  - by Jamie Keeling

  I'm a 21 year old student in my last year of University, and I am looking for information about developer conferences. I live in Derby (United Kingdom) and there's not (As far as I know) many conferences local to where I live. I do have a car at my disposal so travelling shouldn't be a problem. I was hoping somebody could recommend the best way to go about finding and attending a conference, which one is probably the best to go to and what kind of things I'd need to know and take beforehand. I've done a couple of Google searches and searched SO itself but nothing specific to my needs was found. Note: I'm primarily a C# developer using WPF and WinForms but I'm open to pretty much anything.

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• How to introduce versioning for questions on Stack*? [closed]

  - by András Szepesházi

  What today is the best answer for any given question, yesterday was not available and tomorrow will be obsolete. Especially when we're talking about software development. Here is an example for you (there must be thousands, this one is absolutely imaginary): Q: What is the best way to implement autocomplete in javascript? A: (2000) Whut? A: (2007) Write a custom ajax function, display the results after processing A: (2011) Use this plugin: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/ (nono, I'm not a jQuery affiliate, actually I prefer MooTools) What would be your recommendation to introduce versioning for Stack Exchange questions and answers? Is there a need at all for that?

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• Can I remove all-caps and shorten the disclaimer on my License?

  - by stefano palazzo

  I am using the MIT License for a particular piece of code. Now, this license has a big disclaimer in all-caps: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF... ... I've seen a normally capitalised disclaimer on the zlib license (notice that it is above the license text), and even software with no disclaimer at all (which implies, i take it, that there is indeed a guarantee?), but i'd like some sourced advice by a trusted party. I just haven't found any. GNU's License notice for other files comes with this disclaimer: This file is offered as-is, without any warranty. Short and simple. My question therefore: Are there any trusted sources indicating that a short rather than long, and a normally spelled rather than capitalised disclaimer (or even one or the other) are safely usable in all of the jurisdictions I should be concerned with? If the answer turns out to be yes: Why not simply use the short license notice that the fsf proposes for readme-files and short help documents instead of the MIT License? Is there any evidence suggesting this short 'license' will not hold up? For the purposes of this question, the software is released in the European Union, should it make any difference.

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• Modified Strategy Design Pattern

  - by Samuel Walker

  I've started looking into Design Patterns recently, and one thing I'm coding would suit the Strategy pattern perfectly, except for one small difference. Essentially, some (but not all) of my algorithms, need an extra parameter or two passed to them. So I'll either need to pass them an extra parameter when I invoke their calculate method or store them as variables inside the ConcreteAlgorithm class, and be able to update them before I call the algorithm. Is there a design pattern for this need / How could I implement this while sticking to the Strategy Pattern? I've considered passing the client object to all the algorithms, and storing the variables in there, then using that only when the particular algorithm needs it. However, I think this is both unwieldy, and defeats the point of the strategy pattern. Just to be clear I'm implementing in Java, and so don't have the luxury of optional parameters (which would solve this nicely).

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• Outdoor Programming Jobs...

  - by Rodrick Chapman

  Are there any kinds of jobs that require programming (or at least competency) but take place outdoors for a significant portion of the time? As long as I'm fantasizing, an ideal job would involve programming in a high level language like Haskell, F#, or Scala* for, say, 50% of the time and doing something like digging an irrigation trench the rest of the time. My background: I triple majored in mathematics, philosophy, and history (BS/BA) and have been working as a web developer for the past six years. I love hacking but I'm feeling a bit burned out. *I only chose these languages as examples since, ideally, I'd want to work among high caliber people... but it really doesn't matter.

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• Load Balancer impact on web development

  - by confusedGeek

  This question has it's roots in a SharePoint site that I am help with. Background on the issue I dealt with: The dev box and integration server are not setup behind a load balancer. The links were being built using the HttpRequest.Url value from the current context. Note that the links weren't relative links but full URIs. Once we deployed to testing (which has a LB, amongst other things) we received errors on the links being built since the server had an address of "http://some.site.org:999" while the address at the LB as "https://site.org" (SSL was off-loaded at the LB). The fix was easy enough by using relative URIs. The Question: Since this is the first site I've worked with that's behind a Load Balancer on I'm wondering if there are other gotcha's that I need to consider when developing a site behind one?

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• Why are exceptions considered better than explicit error testing?

  - by Richard Keller

  I often come across heated blog posts where the author uses the argument of "exceptions vs explicit error checking" to advocate their preferred language over some other language. The general consensus seems to be that languages which make use of exceptions are inherently better / cleaner than languages which rely heavily on error checking through explicit function calls. Is the use of exceptions considered better programming practice than explicit error checking, and if so, why?

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• Useful certifications for a young programmer

  - by Alain

  As @Paddyslacker elegantly stated in Are certifications worth it? The main purpose of certifications is to make money for the certifying body. I am a fairly young developer, with only an undergraduate degree, and my job is (graciously) offering to sponsor some professional development of my choice (provided it can be argued that it will contribute to the quality of work I do for them). A search online offers a slew of (mostly worthless) certifications one can attain. I'm wondering if there are any that are actually recognized in the (North American) industry as an asset. My local university promoted CIPS (I.S.P., ITCP) at the time I was graduating, but for all I can tell it's just the one that happened to get its foot in the door. It's certainly money grubbing - with a $205 a year fee. So are there any such certifications that provide useful credentials? To better define 'useful' - would it benefit full time developers, or is it only something worth while to the self-employed? Would any certifications lead me to being considered for higher wages, or can that only be achieved with more experience and an higher-level degree?

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• Why is Software Engineering not the typical major for future software developers?

  - by FarmBoy

  While most agree that a certain level of Computer Science is essential to being a good programmer, it seems to me that the principles of good software development is even more important, though not as fundamental. Just like mechanical engineers take physics classes, but far more engineering classes, I would expect, now that software is over a half century old, that software development would begin to dominate the undergraduate curriculum. But I don't see much evidence of this. Is there a reason that Software Engineering hasn't taken hold as an academic discipline?

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• How do you safely work around broken code? [closed]

  - by burnt1ce

  Once in a while, a co-worker will check-in bad code which blocks my application from initializing properly. To get around this problem quickly, I comment out the offending code. I then forget to uncomment the offending code at the time of my check-in, so I want to prevent this from happening again. Do you have any suggestions on how to: Disable bad code that stop you from working Prevent yourself from checking in unwanted changes? I'm currently using Visual Studio as my IDE and TFS as my source code repo.

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