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• What most games would benefit from having

  - by Phil

  I think I've seen "questions" like this on stackoverflow but sorry if I'm overstepping any bounds. Inspired by my recent question and all the nice answers (Checklist for finished game?) I think every gamedev out there has something he/she thinks that almost every game should have. That knowledge is welcome here! So this is probably going to be an inspirational subjective list of some sorts and the point is that anyone reading this question will see a point or two that they've overlooked in their own development and might benefit from adding. I think a good example might be: "some sort of manual or help section. Of course it should be proportional to how advanced the game is. Some users won't need it and won't go looking for it but the other ones that do will become very frustrated if they can't remember how to do something specific that should be in the manual". A bad example might be "good gameplay". Of course every game benefits from this but the answer is not very helpful.

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• Question about creating a sprite based 2-D Side Scroller with scaling/zooming

  - by Arthur

  I'm just wondering if anyone can offer any advice on how best to go about creating a 2-D game with zooming/scaling features akin to the early Samurai Showdown games. In this case it would be a side scroller a la Metal Slug, the zooming would come in as more enemy sprites entered the screen, or when facing a large sized boss. A feature that would be both cosmetic as well as functional to the game. I've done some reading and noticed a few suggestions that included drawing different sized sprites, a standard size and zoomed out size. Any thoughts? Thanks for your time.

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• Making a class pseudo-immutable by setting a flag

  - by scott_fakename

  I have a java project that involves building some pretty complex objects. There are quite a lot (dozens) of different ones and some of them have a HUGE number of parameters. They also need to be immutable. So I was thinking the builder pattern would work, but it ends up require a lot of boilerplate. Another potential solution I thought of was to make a mutable class, but give it a "frozen" flag, a-la ruby. Here is a simple example: public class EqualRule extends Rule { private boolean frozen; private int target; public EqualRule() { frozen = false; } public void setTarget(int i) { if (frozen) throw new IllegalStateException( "Can't change frozen rule."); target = i; } public int getTarget() { return target; } public void freeze() { frozen = true; } @Override public boolean checkRule(int i) { return (target == i); } } and "Rule" is just an abstract class that has an abstract "checkRule" method. This cuts way down on the number of objects I need to write, while also giving me an object that becomes immutable for all intents and purposes. This kind of act like the object was its own Builder... But not quite. I'm not too excited, however, about having an immutable being disguised as a bean however. So I had two questions: 1. Before I go too far down this path, are there any huge problems that anyone sees right off the bat? For what it's worth, it is planned that this behavior will be well documented... 2. If so, is there a better solution? Thanks

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• Informing GUI objects about screen size - Designing

  - by Mosquito

  I have a problem with designing classes for my game which I create. In my app, there is: class CGame which contains all the information about game itself, e.g. screen width, screen height, etc. In the main() function I create a pointer to CGame instance. class CGUIObject which includes fields specifying it's position and draw() method, which should know how to draw an object according to screen size. class CGUIManager which is a singleton and it includes a list of CGUIObject's. For each object in a list it just calls draw() method. For clarity's sake, I'll put some simple code: class CGame { int screenWidth; int screenHeight; }; class CGUIObject { CPoint position; void draw(); // this one needs to know what is a screen's width and height }; class CGUIManager // it's a singleton { vector<CGUIObject*> guiObjects; void drawObjects(); }; And the main.cpp: CGame* g; int main() { g = new CGame(); while(1) { CGUIManager::Instance().drawObjects(); } return 0; } Now the problem is, that each CGUIObject needs to know the screen size which is held by CGame, but I find it very dumb to include pointer to CGame instance in every object. Could anyone, please, tell me what would be the best approach to achieve this?

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• Is there any CSS selector to reach an element outside of the current container?

  - by acidrums4

  (And excuse me for my bad english, for starters...) Sorry if this is a noob question, but I really don't know if the following is possible. I'm doing a html5 portfolio. I'm following a tuto from codrops to visually filter works with only css3 (http://tympanus.net/codrops/2012/01/09/filter-functionality-with-css3/). There, user can select which category want to see with some <input type="radio">'s. But those selectors are under the same container (a <section>) and give visibility for the elements via CSS using a general sibling combinator (~). So in that example, the CSS code goes like this: .ff-container input.ff-selector-type-all:checked ~ label.ff-label-type-all, .ff-container input.ff-selector-type-1:checked ~ label.ff-label-type-1, .ff-container input.ff-selector-type-2:checked ~ label.ff-label-type-2, .ff-container input.ff-selector-type-3:checked ~ label.ff-label-type-3{ background: linear-gradient(top, #646d93 0%,#7c87ad 100%); color: #424d71; text-shadow: 0px 1px 1px rgba(255,255,255,0.3); box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 1px #40496e, 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.1) inset; } The thing is I want to put those <input type="radio">'s on the <head> section of my portfolio, but obviously the ~ selector won't work there. So my question is that is there any selector, hack or something that can do that? Something like .ff-container input.ff-selector-type-all:checked $ header > label.ff-label-type-all { awesomeness:100%; } I really don't want to use Javascript/Jquery for that... Thank you so much in advance!

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• Browser problem for background-size property [migrated]

  - by Sangram

  I am using one picture as my background of header of my blog. CSS i have used is #header-wrapper { height:125px; padding: 0px; margin: 0; background: url("http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lxBSX0YJV58/TOspWPI1r-I/AAAAAAAAA34/uw872WFS3ME/s1600/headerbg.jpg") top center no-repeat; background-size: 1120px 124px; } original width of an image is 990 px and i made it 1120px using property background-size: 1120px 124px; It looks okay in firefox 4 and Opera 11 but doesn't work in IE 7, Palemoon etc. image size does not increases and remains 990 px. You can check my blog HERE Any help...how can i make it compatible with all browsers ?

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• Entity Framework 5, separating business logic from model - Repository?

  - by bnice7

  I am working on my first public-facing web application and I’m using MVC 4 for the presentation layer and EF 5 for the DAL. The database structure is locked, and there are moderate differences between how the user inputs data and how the database itself gets populated. I have done a ton of reading on the repository pattern (which I have never used) but most of my research is pushing me away from using it since it supposedly creates an unnecessary level of abstraction for the latest versions of EF since repositories and unit-of-work are already built-in. My initial approach is to simply create a separate set of classes for my business objects in the BLL that can act as an intermediary between my Controllers and the DAL. Here’s an example class: public class MyBuilding { public int Id { get; private set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string Notes { get; set; } private readonly Entities _context = new Entities(); // Is this thread safe? private static readonly int UserId = WebSecurity.GetCurrentUser().UserId; public IEnumerable<MyBuilding> GetList() { IEnumerable<MyBuilding> buildingList = from p in _context.BuildingInfo where p.Building.UserProfile.UserId == UserId select new MyBuilding {Id = p.BuildingId, Name = p.BuildingName, Notes = p.Building.Notes}; return buildingList; } public void Create() { var b = new Building {UserId = UserId, Notes = this.Notes}; _context.Building.Add(b); _context.SaveChanges(); // Set the building ID this.Id = b.BuildingId; // Seed 1-to-1 tables with reference the new building _context.BuildingInfo.Add(new BuildingInfo {Building = b}); _context.GeneralInfo.Add(new GeneralInfo {Building = b}); _context.LocationInfo.Add(new LocationInfo {Building = b}); _context.SaveChanges(); } public static MyBuilding Find(int id) { using (var context = new Entities()) // Is this OK to do in a static method? { var b = context.Building.FirstOrDefault(p => p.BuildingId == id && p.UserId == UserId); if (b == null) throw new Exception("Error: Building not found or user does not have access."); return new MyBuilding {Id = b.BuildingId, Name = b.BuildingInfo.BuildingName, Notes = b.Notes}; } } } My primary concern: Is the way I am instantiating my DbContext as a private property thread-safe, and is it safe to have a static method that instantiates a separate DbContext? Or am I approaching this all wrong? I am not opposed to learning up on the repository pattern if I am taking the total wrong approach here.

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• Player rewards in games where you normally have nothing to purchase

  - by PeterK

  In many games there are rewards such as gold coins, points, etc. When these rewards can be used to purchase in-game items, it motivates the player to keep playing. Let's say we have an online game, poker, Yatzy etc. What type of reward would keep the players playing if there are few in-game items available to buy, or none at all? What I am looking for is a reward system that entices the players to play more in a game environment where there isn't that much to purchase. For example, there isn't much to buy in a poker or Yatzy game with the gold you win. I guess having some titles that are added to the userid is one way, or maybe purchasing a logo for the id... A leaderboard is another. Any thoughts on this?

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• What are the advantages of storing xml in a relational database?

  - by Chris

  I was poking around the AdventureWorks database today and I noticed that a number of tables (HumanResources.JobCandidate and Sales.Individual for example) have a column which is storing xml data. What I would to know is, what is the advantage of storing basically a database table row's worth of data in another table's column? Doesn't this make it difficult to query off of this information? Or is the assumption that the data won't need to be queried and just needs to be stored?

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• What language(s) do I need to learn in order to develop an application like this?

  - by Josh

  I have an idea for making a web application. Ideally this application would have products which prices are increased each time a Retweet of the product at hand is made. Kind of like bids with tweets. Unfortunately my web development knowledge is very scarce. I know just basic HTML, virtually no CSS and that's it. I'm kindly asking for your insights on what you think would be best for making a web app like this. I have no good idea of where to start or what I need to get going. Your inputs are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• Can observer pattern be represented by cars and traffic lights?

  - by eeerahul

  I wanted to verify with all of you, if I have a correct Observer Pattern analogy. The scenario is as follows: Consider, at a junction, there is a traffic signal, having red, yellow and green lights respectively. There are vehicles facing the traffic signal post. When it shows red, the vehicles stop, when it shows green, the vehicles move on. In case, it is yellow, the driver must decide whether to go or to stop, depending on whether he/she has crossed the stop line or not. At the same time, there are vehicles that do not care about the signal. They would do as they like. The similarities are that, the Traffic Signal happens to be the subject, notifying its states by glowing the appropriate lights. Those looking at it and following the signal are the ones subscribed to it, and behave according to the state of the subject. Those who do not care about it, are sort-of un-subscribed from the traffic signal. Please tell me, if you think this is a correct analogy or not?

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• Image slider not working when website is hosted on remote server [on hold]

  - by Tushar Khatiwada

  I'm having a different problem. I made a html website and it contains Nivo Slider in the index page. The site is working perfectly when viewed locally. I uploaded the site to remote server but the slider is not being displayed and the photo from the gallery is not working as expected ( popups on the local pc). The url of the site is: http://d138444.u24.elitehostingwizard.com/ The screenshot from the local pc: http://postimg.org/image/lxiqzx7br/ Thanks

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• Implenting ActiveRecord with inheritance?

  - by King

  I recently converted an old application that was using XML files as the data store to use SQL instead. To avoid a lot of changes I basically created ActiveRecord style classes that inherited from the original business objects. For example SomeClassRecord :SomeClass //ID Property //Save method I then used this new class in place of the other one, because of polymorphism I didn't need to change any methods that took SomeClass as a parameter. Would this be considered 'Bad'? What would be a better alternative?

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• Pending and Approval process

  - by zen

  So let's say I have a DB table with 8 columns, one is a unique auto-incrementing used as ID. So I have a page that pulls in the info for each row based on query string ID. I want to give my users the ability to propose changes. Kinda like a wiki setup. So I was thinking I should just have another duplicate table or maybe database altogether (without the auto-incrementing column and maybe with a date edited column) that keeps all proposed changes in queue and then when I approve them, the script can move the row from the proposed DB to the real DB. Does this sound good or is there a better process for this?

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• Should i continue my self-taught coding practice or learn how to do coding professionally?

  - by G1i1ch

  Lately I've been getting professional work, hanging out with other programmers, and making friends in the industry. The only thing is I'm 100% self-taught. It's caused my style to extremely deviate from the style of those that are properly trained. It's the techniques and organization of my code that's different. It's a mixture of several things I do. I tend to blend several programming paradigms together. Like Functional and OO. I lean to the Functional side more than OO, but I see the use of OO when something would make more sense as an abstract entity. Like a game object. Next I also go the simple route when doing something. When in contrast, it seems like sometimes the code I see from professional programmers is complicated for the sake of it! I use lots of closures. And lastly, I'm not the best commenter. I find it easier just to read through my code than reading the comment. And most cases I just end up reading the code even if there are comments. Plus I've been told that, because of how simply I write my code, it's very easy to read it. I hear professionally trained programmers go on and on about things like unit tests. Something I've never used before so I haven't even the faintest idea of what they are or how they work. Lots and lots of underscores "_", which aren't really my taste. Most of the techniques I use are straight from me, or a few books I've read. Don't know anything about MVC, I've heard a lot about it though with things like backbone.js. I think it's a way to organize an application. It just confuses me though because by now I've made my own organizational structures. It's a bit of a pain. I can't use template applications at all when learning something new like with Ubuntu's Quickly. I have trouble understanding code that I can tell is from someone trained. Complete OO programming really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet that seems to be what EVERYONE else is strictly using. It's left me not that confident in the look of my code, or wondering whether I'll cause sparks when joining a company or maybe contributing to open source projects. In fact I'm rather scared of the fact that people will eventually be checking out my code. Is this just something normal any programmer goes through or should I really look to change up my techniques?

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• Where to get PNG icons/graphics for game development for kids? [closed]

  - by at.

  Possible Duplicate: Where can I find free sprites and images? I'm teaching kids to program using Ruby and the gaming framework Gosu/Chingu. Kids love it, including the part where they have to look for the icons/graphics for their game objects. I direct them to iconarchive.com, but the selection is sometimes very limited, the graphics aren't always with transparent backgrounds and sometimes the art requires payment. I don't mind paying for an educational license of some sort, but I want the kids to easily select graphics they can use in their games. Is there another resource better suited for this purpose? I don't have a good solution for this, but would also love a site they can get cool background images for their games.

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• Maya and Game Engines (i.e. Environment Testing)

  - by DiscreteGenius

  What does it mean if I'm designing an environment and I want to test it in the game engine, to see what its like to "run" [or fly] around my environment? I heard an instructor say that exact thing in a Maya training video and I'd like to know more about "How Game Engines and Maya are related to each other." He stated this would be done to see how things look in "size" (e.g. I assume he meant: 'How big is the cathedral, bridge, wall, building, etc.'). I've tried to research such information but it's too complicated, and detailed. I just want a simplistic response to my query. Thanks to everyone willing to help and not criticize my question.

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• Creating a Application in Winrt that requires Internet

  - by wtsang02

  I am making a paid App for Windows 8, c#. I am wondering which is better? If my application doesn't need internet connection normally but does requires internet connection for the first time to download content data. --Makes my life easier Load the default data when installing. Then ask the user if he wants to update in app. -- Making the default data will be pain. Now my big question is, is it safe to assume user has access to internet now-a-days when using application that shouldn't require internet?

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• Clarify the Single Responsibility Principle.

  - by dsimcha

  The Single Responsibility Principle states that a class should do one and only one thing. Some cases are pretty clear cut. Others, though, are difficult because what looks like "one thing" when viewed at a given level of abstraction may be multiple things when viewed at a lower level. I also fear that if the Single Responsibility Principle is honored at the lower levels, excessively decoupled, verbose ravioli code, where more lines are spent creating tiny classes for everything and plumbing information around than actually solving the problem at hand, can result. How would you describe what "one thing" means? What are some concrete signs that a class really does more than "one thing"?

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• How can I designed multi-threaded application for larger user base

  - by rokonoid

  Here's my scenario, I need to develop a scalable application. My user base may be over 100K, every user has 10 or more small tasks. Tasks check every minute with a third party application through web services, retrieving data which is written in the database, then the data is forwarded to it's original destination. So here's the processing of a small task: while(true){ Boolean isNewInformationAvailable = checkWhetherInformationIsAvailableOrNot(); If(isNewInformationAvailable ==true){ fetchTheData(); writeToDatabase(); findTheDestination(); deliverTheData(); isAvailable =false; } } Here is the question: as the application is large, how should I approach designing this. I'm going to use Java to write it. Should I use concurrency, and how would you manage the concurrency?

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• Moving dozens of existing standalone retail sites to one central inventory database: what should I know going in?

  - by palintropos

  This will be the first project of this scale that I have attempted, and the first time I have run a website at all (much less dozens) using an off-site database. In particular, I'd like to know: what sort of optimizations I should read up on to make this run as smoothly as possible? any pitfalls/gotchas wiser, more experienced folk are aware of I should be on the lookout for, and what damage-control and preventative measures I should take against the nightmare scenario of the main server (hosting the database) having an outage, grinding over 100 websites to a halt (because they have no access to the product data).

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• Search multiple tables

  - by gilden

  I have developed a web application that is used mainly for archiving all sorts of textual material (documents, references to articles, books, magazines etc.). There can be any given number of archive tables in my system, each with its own schema. The schema can be changed by a moderator through the application (imagine something similar to a really dumbed down version of phpMyAdmin). Users can search for anything from all of the tables. By using FULLTEXT indexes together with substring searching (fields which do not support FULLTEXT indexing) the script inserts the results of a search to a single table and by ordering these results by the similarity measure I can fairly easily return the paginated results. However, this approach has a few problems: substring searching can only count exact results the 50% rule applies to all tables separately and thus, mysql may not return important matches or too naively discards common words. is quite expensive in terms of query numbers and execution time (not an issue right now as there's not a lot of data yet in the tables). normalized data is not even searched for (I have different tables for categories, languages and file attatchments). My planned solution Create a single table having columns similar to id, table_id, row_id, data Every time a new row is created/modified/deleted in any of the data tables this central table also gets updated with the data column containing a concatenation of all the fields in a row. I could then create a single index for Sphinx and use it for doing searches instead. Are there any more efficient solutions or best practises how to approach this? Thanks.

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• What patterns book for iOS development contains this specific information? [closed]

  - by Brett Ryan

  I've read several books on iOS development and Objective-C, however what a lot of them teach is how to work with interfaces and all contain the model inside the view controller, i.e. a UITableViewController based view will simply have an NSArray as it's model. I'm interested in what the best practices are for designing the structure of an application. Specifically I'm interested in best practices for the following: How to separate a model from the view controller. I think I know how to do this by simply replacing the NSArray style example with a specific model object, however what I do not know how to do is alert the view when the model changes. For example in .NET I would solve this by conforming to INotifyPropertyChanged and databinding, and similarly with Java I would use PropertyChangeListener. How to create a service model for my domain objects. For example I want to learn the best way to create a service for a hypothetical Widget object to manage an internal DB and also services for communicating with remote endpoints. I need to learn the best ways to do this in a way that interface components can subscribe to events such as widgetUpdated. These services should be singleton classes and some how dependency injected into model/controller objects. Books I've read so far are: Programming in Objective-C (4th Edition) Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook: Expanded Electronic Edition: Essentials and Advanced Recipes for iOS Programmers Learn Objective-C on the Mac: For OS X and iOS I've also purchased the following updated books but not yet read them. The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook (4th edition Programming in Objective-C (5th Edition) I come from a Java and C# background with 15 years experience, I understand that many of the ways I would do things in these languages may not fit to the ObjC way of developing applications. Would someone be able to provide me with the book on this topic containing this specific subject matter?

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• Tiling Problem Solutions for Various Size "Dominoes"

  - by user67081

  I've got an interesting tiling problem, I have a large square image (size 128k so 131072 squares) with dimensons 256x512... I want to fill this image with certain grain types (a 1x1 tile, a 1x2 strip, a 2x1 strip, and 2x2 square) and have no overlap, no holes, and no extension past the image boundary. Given some probability for each of these grain types, a list of the number required to be placed is generated for each. Obviously an iterative/brute force method doesn't work well here if we just randomly place the pieces, instead a certain algorithm is required. 1) all 2x2 square grains are randomly placed until exhaustion. 2) 1x2 and 2x1 grains are randomly placed alternatively until exhaustion 3) the remaining 1x1 tiles are placed to fill in all holes. It turns out this algorithm works pretty well for some cases and has no problem filling the entire image, however as you might guess, increasing the probability (and thus number) of 1x2 and 2x1 grains eventually causes the placement to stall (since there are too many holes created by the strips and not all them can be placed). My approach to this solution has been as follows: 1) Create a mini-image of size 8x8 or 16x16. 2) Fill this image randomly and following the algorithm specified above so that the desired probability of the entire image is realized in the mini-image. 3) Create N of these mini-images and then randomly successively place them in the large image. Unfortunately there are some downfalls to this simplification. 1) given the small size of the mini-images, nailing an exact probability for the entire image is not possible. Example if I want p(2x1)=P(1x2)=0.4, the mini image may only give 0.41 as the closes probability. 2) The mini-images create a pseudo boundary where no overlaps occur which isn't really descriptive of the model this is being used for. 3) There is only a fixed number of mini-images so i'm not sure how random this really is. I'm really just looking to brainstorm about possible solutions to this. My main concern is really to nail down closer probabilities, now one might suggest I just increase the mini-image size. Well I have, and it turns out that in certain cases(p(1x2)=p(2x1)=0.5) the mini-image 16x16 isn't even iteratively solvable.. So it's pretty obvious how difficult it is to randomly solve this for anything greater than 8x8 sizes.. So I'd love to hear some ideas. Thanks

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• How can I get non-programmer colleagues on board with bespoke software rather than Dynamics CRM + Sharepoint?

  - by Bendos

  I am working with a company which designs and builds one-off machines. They have been 'dabbling' with hosted Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint (on different servers!) in an attempt to centralise their data and help colleagues collaborate more effectively across projects. They haven't used either system to their potential. Now we are looking at the engineering department who already use a form of version control software for the various CAD files (Autodesk Vault) however it is becoming increasingly necessary to implement more of a generic file version control system as they use many more files than can be managed in Vault (sometimes just photos or scans of paper documents), hence why they were looking at using Sharepoint. However... as the 'programmer' of the bunch, I can see several scenarios which don't seem to fit well with the Dynamics + Sharepoint approach; simple reports based on cross-table queries, exporting certain metrics as a spreadsheet, defining project hierarchies and many-many relationships, and as such I have been pushing for an in-house developed 'ECM' / 'ERP' software package (perhaps in .NET or php). Some colleagues seem to attach a greater value to the MS software (perhaps becuase it has a logo!) but don't see that it's just a framework, not a solution. Can anyone provide a good example of when custom software would actually be better than using Dynamics + Sharepoint and how do I relate that to non-technical staff?

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