Topics started by Anne Buit

41 Topics

Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Dealing with deadlocksBlog

When a developer creates a code template and assigns it to a program object, the order in which the code is executed is often neglected. This can lead to some serious issues, one of which we are discussing today. Deadlocks. A deadlock usually does not occur until a product is used in a production environment. Even though transactions are rolled back and no real harm is done, the developer will often have to solve the deadlock issues with great haste. This blog post will provide some guidelines on how to find and solve a deadlock. In this blog post, I’m assuming that the isolation level is the current default isolation level for products – Read Committed. How deadlocks occur A deadlock will occur when a transaction (A) is trying to access one or more rows which are in use by another transaction (B). Normally this is not a problem, the transaction (A) will wait until the rows are released. But the transaction (A) will wait indefinitely when the other transaction (B) is waiting

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Superhero
11 months ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Switching from SSMS to Azure Data Studio - Tips & TricksBlog

SQL Server Management Studio has been the backbone for writing queries and managing SQL Server databases for a long time now. I’ve been using SSMS for well over a decade.A new kid on the block - Azure Data Studio - is gaining popularity. This IDE has been around for a couple of years now and is a close relative to Visual Studio Code. And with the possibility of plugging in extensions such as GitHub Copilot, I’ve recently completely switched to Azure Data Studio.In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the features of Azure Data Studio and suggest some key binding changes which I did make the transition from SSMS to Azure Data Studio easier. Familiarize yourself with F1Not unlike Visual Studio Code, virtually all commands, actions and settings can be done in Azure Data Studio via the F1 menu. If you want to do something and you don’t see a button - always press F1.The F1 menu of Azure Data Studio Tab display sizeThis may be a personal preference - I always ensure tabs are back to their orig

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Sidekick
2 months ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Applications using Crystal Reports in Azure CloudBlog

The Thinkwise Platform supports various types of report generation solutions. The choice for a certain type of reporting has functional implications. For instance, not all reporting solutions support the usage of sub-reports. Other reporting solutions may offer more features regarding the use of SVG images or HTML markup.There are also non-functional aspects to consider. License costs is often noted. Another important aspect is the portability of the reports. Not every type of report can run on both Windows and Linux environments.Quite some research has gone into the portability of the usage of Crystal Reports lately. We’d like to share some of our findings in this blog.Runtime installationAdministrators who have deployed applications using Crystal Reports know that it requires the installation of the Crystal Reports runtime. Either on the desktop clients when the Windows GUI is used or on the web server when the reports are generated by Indicium, the Application Tier, or the Web GUI.A

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
2 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Drag-drop of recordsBlog

When I leave my house every morning, I pick up my car keys from the counter and put them in my pocket. To me, this is a very common way of interacting with an object. I grab the keys, move them into my pocket and let go of the keys. But when it comes to our software, this would happen very differently. I would select the Car keys record, put it in edit mode and change a field indicating the location from Counter to My pocket. I would then save the record and.. *Poof!* – The keys are now in my pocket. Very unnatural if you ask me. Editing the car keys? I sound like a locksmith! This new feature, however, will bring our applications one step closer to the real world: Drag-drop of records! Model-driven drag-dropAs with every feature, the definition of drag-drop is a part of the model. To keep things as easy and accessible as possible, no new logic concepts were introduced. The existing concepts of tasks and corresponding context logic are used. Besides that, variants play a bi

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
2 months ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Revised creation and automationBlog

The Thinkwise Platform version 2021.3 has revised the way the Creation screen works, opening up more elegant ways to leverage tooling to automate this process.The generation screen consists of a number of steps:Generate definition Validate definition Generate source code Execute source code Run unit testsThis has remained unchanged between versions 2021.2 and 2021.3. However, the way these steps are performed has fundamentally changed.In the previous version, the steps in the generation screen were bound to a specific client. A developer would start Generate definition and the definition generation would be orchestrated start-to-end by the users client. This has served us well for many years, but there are some drawbacks that we’ve addressed in this release. The new Creation approachAll ‘jobs’ are no longer performed by a client, but are instead performed by Indicium. This means that generation, validation and such will continue even if the developer closes the screen or even the Softw

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
1 year ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

(Re)design your rolesBlog

Thinkwise Platform version 2019.1 migrated the maintenance of roles from the Intelligent Application Manager to the Software Factory. This migration is in a way symbolic – The developers are fully responsible for creating and maintaining the roles within the application. Before role-based access control was introduced, rights would be granted directly to user groups. When upgrading an older version of the Thinkwise Platform (G9 or earlier), temporary roles would be automatically created based on the user groups to ensure nothing changed for end users. Not everyone replaced these temporary roles with proper roles. An earlier blog was written around the time of the 2017.1 release, which introduced roles and presented global guidelines. Today, I’ll be providing more detailed guidelines for role administration within your application, even if it was built before roles were introduced. What is a role?A role is a collection of rights that allows a user to carry out a single resp

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Arjan Sollie
Thinkwise blogger
6 months ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Case: A message protocol-independent web service (part 1 of 2)Blog

Indicium provides APIs for all kinds of back-end services, such as entities, tasks, reports and process flows. These APIs use the OData protocol.However, there are scenarios where integration in the application landscape requires applications built using the Thinkwise Platform to expose an API using a different protocol.Think of a SOAP service with a WSDL or a REST service which doesn’t conform to OData protocol. This can be an endpoint for a message bus or a high-level composite service to integrate in the landscape.Message protocol independent web servicesIn version 2021.1 of the Software Factory, Message protocol independent web services in a process flows were introduced to support this.This feature allows you to create entirely custom APIs, receive and process the HTTP requests on the database, and set the HTTP response as well.Note: These type of webservices provide a lot of freedom and flexibility. However, matters normally handled by Indicium such as routing, request/response p

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
3 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager

[Breaking] Crystal Reports Service Pack 21+News

Context About two years ago, Service Pack 21 of Crystal Reports was released. This new service pack required applications such as the Windows GUI to update to a new version of Crystal Reports. Furthermore, the required .NET Framework version for this Service Pack was updated to to 4.7.1. Updating to the new version would mean that the previous service pack would no longer be supported and older .NET Framework versions would no longer be supported. To keep supporting the status quo, we set the maximum supported version of Crystal Reports to Service Pack 20. Since only one version of Crystal Reports can be installed on a client machine, this meant all other applications using Crystal Reports were also limited to Service Pack 20 or earlier. Breaking change We will be upgrading the following Thinkwise Platform components to only support Service Pack 21+ of Crystal Reports: Windows GUI Web GUI Indicium Indicium Universal Reporting Service The required .NET Framework version for these compo

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Hugo Nienhuis
Superhero
4 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Performance troubleshootingBlog

At Thinkwise, we strive to make development and maintenance of enterprise applications as easy as possible. But in the end, an operational application will have a lot of moving parts. Performance troubleshooting comes down to identifying and resolving a problem in one of those many moving parts.Unfortunately, most of the time it ends up in a witch hunt. Kick in every virtual door to find out what causes the curse. This makes performance troubleshooting very time- and resource intensive. Today, I’ll share a very focused approach to resolve performance issues.The title of this blog might as well be: How to avoid the red herrings! Performance troubleshooting processThere are many ways to approach performance troubleshooting. This blog uses a certain script that can be used and adapted for your own needs. The script assumes a single, agile development team working on an application.The script for performance troubleshootingI’ll go into detail for all the steps, but I’d like to start off wi

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Moderator
2 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

T-SQL features you might have missed - Part 2Blog

SQL Server 2012In case you missed part 1 of the new features. Window function framesThis feature is a really cool enhancement to window functions which fills a niche gap for queries of a cumulative nature. A window function can be applied on a limited set in regards to the partitioning, the ordering and the current row. Other language featuresThe parse function has also been added which can be used to parse data using culture-specific settings. The try_parse function will provide null-values when this fails instead of causing an error. New functions such as datefromparts, timefromparts make it very easy to create a date or time object by providing years, months, days, minutes, etc. instead of a date or time string The eomonth function provides you with the last day of the month based on a date in this month. It is possible to provide an extra parameter which SQL Server 2014SQL Server 2014 brought a lot of new cool features and performance to the table, but the

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
5 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Look-up the Display ValueBlog

Virtually every table in an application has a primary key. The primary key is unique per record and can be used to refer to the record. For instance, the table Person can use a number as primary key. However, when a person is referenced in the application, we do not want to see this number. When we are referring to a person, we want to see the name of the person. The name of the person is said to be the display value of the person. The display value of a person could be variable, depending on the context of where this person is referenced. The display value might even be stored in another table, especially when dealing with link tables. Obtaining a set of keys and display values and translating a key into a display value is called a look-up. This blog is about look-up display values and how to use them effectively. TerminologyIn the example with persons, the Person table is used as a look-up table. The look-up table is the table you would see if you were to open the look-up po

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
5 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

T-SQL features you might have missed - Part 1Blog

While SQL Server 2008r2 is currently the minimum version for SF and IAM, products created using the SF can use any version (up to 2017 at the time of writing). In this blog, I’d like to share some of the introduced language features in versions 2012 up to 2017 and explain how you can use them in your products. This blog focuses only on Transact-SQL syntax features you can use in your own application logic. Features such as new database management functions, new data types, new types of database objects or optimization features will be saved for another time. SQL Server 2012Eventually we will set the minimal version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2012. This provides us with the opportunity to use language features introduced in SQL Server 2012 in the Software Factory, the Intelligent Application Manager and in Indicium and the GUI’s when accessing the databases. The following features are discussed: FETCH OFFSET THROW TRY_CONVERT IIF CHOOSE CONCAT LEAD and LAG, FIRST_VALUE

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
5 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Modular releases

Thinkwise Platform 2019.2 will ship with a new feature to aid independent software vendors in releasing applications using a module-based licensing model. A module is a bundle of functionality that can be released separately from other modules. They can be large such as HR, Purchasing or Production. Alternatively, they can be smaller modules with only a few tasks such as Promotions. Modules can also be add-ons to existing modules such as Purchasing analytics. There are no constraints imposed by the Software Factory when it comes to the size of a module or dependencies between modules. What defines a module? One of the major decisions we had to make was on how to limit the application based on a set of selected modules. We could limit the database objects to those relevant to the selected modules. But this strategy has some caveats: Developers would have to tag the module(s) for every single database object. Dependencies in the logic layer to objects of modules will cause confli

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Mark van den Berg
Apprentice
4 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Case: A message protocol-independent web service (part 2 of 2)Blog

In part one of this case we’ve outlined the general case and implemented several of the CRUD functionalities as well as response paginations.If you have missed part one, you can find it here:Case: A message protocol-independent web service (part 1 of 2)The final two endpointsWe now continue with the final two endpoints and we’ll test the service in part two.The final two endpoints are:Select license by applicationCode and productCode Select applications with an active license for accessSelect license by applicationCode and productCodeThis endpoint allows the caller to load a license based on an applicationCode and productCode.The swagger example call to load the license based on an application code and product codeNote that the applicationCode and productCode are mandatory and are placed as path segments, whereas additional filters are optional and are set as query parameters.Furthermore, the entire endpoint resides under a /check/ path. The routing logic has taken care of this by ensu

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Moderator
2 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Introducing: AutoMLNews

One of the main goals for the Thinkwise Platform is to enable developers to focus on the functional aspects of software development instead of the technical aspects. To allow developers to leverage machine learning with minimal technical hurdles, we've added AutoML to the Thinkwise Platform in version 2020.2! Machine learning Machine learning combines software engineering with the field of mathematics and statistics to create algorithms that can learn from experience. To apply this in the field, data scientists use domain knowledge to apply these algorithms to create machine learning models that can make estimates and predictions based on the knowledge gained from experience. In applications built with the Thinkwise Platform, experience is often existing historical data. Machine Learning techniques in these applications are often leveraged for calculations that are difficult or impossible to express with regular code. Some examples include: Demand predictions over time Project cos

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
1 year ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Automatic license renewalNews

In an effort to make deployment easier for everyone, we've updated the license mechanism in the Thinkwise Platform. Downloading and importing a license will be a thing of the past as of version 2020.2. As mentioned before, Indicium Universal will be a mandatory component in any environment. Not only to be able to use Universal, Scheduling and AutoML, but also for the automatic license renewal mechanism. Indicium Universal will automatically renew licenses for environments without the need for any user interaction. Furthermore, the innovation fee report in IAM has been removed from the Intelligent Application Manager - the contents of this report will be exchanged when renewing the license. The expression environment will be used a lot in this blog. This expression is used to denote an Intelligent Application Manager with the applications present in this IAM and all runtime components attached, such as Indicium Universal, GUI's, etc. Unregistered environments By default, all envir

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Vanguard
3 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Lifecycle Policy for Runtime Components

The Thinkwise Platform allows applications to stay functionally and technologically up-to-date. This is at the core of our mission.Free the world of legacy softwareTo keep this promise, we must eventually remove support for runtime components that use aged technologies or architectures. While they are supported, they may hamper further architectural developments of the Thinkwise Platform and take up valuable development time. Support for modern deployment scenarios, operating systems, and browsers becomes difficult and ultimately impossible.Most importantly, as technology ages, it poses an increased security risk. For any technology, some vulnerabilities may be discovered. While these can be resolved quickly for modern technologies,  framework developers and component vendors eventually discontinue support for older technologies. This puts applications that use these technologies at risk. An application using the 2-tier Visual Basic 6 GUI. Support for this user interface was discontinu

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
1 year ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager

End of SQL Server 2012, 2014 supportNews

Thinkwise Platform version 2020.1 will no longer officially support SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014.The official minimum supported version of SQL Server will be 2016.Impact on development environmentsVersion 2020.1 of the Software Factory will leverage temporal tables. This immediately brings the minimum required version of SQL Server to 2016 upon release.The Deployment Center will prevent installation or upgrade of the Software Factory to version 2020.1 when the SQL Server version is below 2016 or the database compatibility of the Software Factory database is below SQL Server 2016.Impact on production environmentsThe Intelligent Application Manager, Indicium service tier and the GUI's will not immediately leverage SQL Server 2016 features with the upcoming 2020.1 release.Existing products will continue to work on SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 for now. New database versions of products built using the Software Factory 2020.1 will not require SQL Server version 2016, unless te

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Dennis van Leeuwen
Hero
4 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Bye-bye SOAP service tiers!Blog

With the upcoming release of 2019.1, we are discontinuing support for generating Java and C# service tiers. The Windows GUI will no longer be able to use these service tiers as a back-end. This blog describes the reasoning behind this and the (better) alternatives that are available. It is important to note that the generated SOAP service tiers have done a great job in advancing the Thinkwise Platform. At the time when these service tiers were released, they were state-of-the-art and solved some important challenges. Many applications have used these service tiers in production environments. But like any technology, it must eventually yield to a successor. The true power of the Thinkwise Platform lies in the fact that a technology switch like this can actually be made. Why get rid of them?The main reason to use the generated Java and C# service tiers was to support Mobile. Mobile GUI’s cannot directly connect to the database and needed the service tiers as proxy. Version 2017.

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
5 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager

End of SQL Server 2016 supportNews

Hello all,Advance notice for everyone still using SQL Server 2016. Mainstream support by Microsoft has ended last July. As per our lifecycle policy, official support for this version will be discontinued in a future release.As it stands, Thinkwise Platform 2022.1, to be released early next year, will no longer officially support SQL Server 2016 and will require SQL Server 2017 or higher.Note that the upcoming release of the Thinkwise Platform (version 2021.3) will still support SQL Server 2016.Impact on the platform databasesThe Software Factory (SF) and the Intelligent Application Manager (IAM) are planned to leverage T-SQL language features exclusive to SQL Server 2017 and up. The Deployment Center will prevent installation or upgrade of an SF or IAM to version 2022.1 when the SQL Server version is below 2017 or the database compatibility level is below 140.Impact on product databasesSQL Server product databases running on SQL Server 2016 do not have to be upgraded directly on releas

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Mark Jongeling
Administrator
2 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager

Universal 2021.1 support releasedrelease notes

Hello everyone,The first version of Universal with support for Thinkwise Platform 2021.1 has just been released.The version number is 2021.1.10. Subsequent versions of Universal will also adhere to this version numbering structure to indicate the Thinkwise Platform version compatibility. This matches our other runtime components such as Indicium and other GUIs.RequirementsUniversal 2021.1 requires an Indicium Universal with at least version 2021.1 to be installed.Hotfix for earlier platform versionsUniversal 2021.1 is backwards compatible with earlier versions of the Thinkwise Platform as per our lifecycle policy.However, to be able to use Universal 2021.1 with Thinkwise Platform version 2020.2 or earlier, a hotfix that has been released today must be executed in those environments. This hotfix affects both the Software Factory and the Intelligent Application Manager.The hotfix can be recognised as 20201224 - Universal look-up refactor.Note that this hotfix for Thinkwise Platform versi

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
3 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager

Heads-up: Indicium Universal soon mandatory (2020.2)release notes

Having Indicium Universal running in an environment has been optional since Thinkwise Platform version 2019.2, to be able to run the Universal GUI. For Thinkwise Platform version 2020.1, Indicium Universal was also required to be able to leverage the scheduling feature. Starting with Thinkwise Platform version 2020.2, an active Indicium Universal will be mandatory for the platform to function correctly. Indicium & Indicium Universal Indicium comes in two flavors, which are both actively supported: The Indicium runtime component has been in service for a long time. This variant is used as back-end for the Mobile GUI and 3-tier Windows GUI. However, the required runtime component will be Indicium Universal, currently used for scheduling and as a back-end for Universal. When providing api's to external parties, this runtime component is best suited for the job as well. Note: Both an Indicium and Indicium Universal runtime can be active at the same time for a Thinkwise Platform

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
3 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Forecasting demoBlog

Hi all,Recently, we’ve released Thinkwise Platform version 2023.2. This release includes the ability to apply timeseries forecasting to your data.In our recent release session, we showed a demo application that uses forecasting. This application is now available in the Thinkstore.Simply download the solution, generate, execute and start the application via the Universal GUI.The solution is available under the name ‘Forecasting’The example applicationSince the model in the Thinkstore is shipped with some example data, so you can try it out right away.You will be prompted with a single menu item that shows a small list of articles with article sales for the last year.The application is shipped with some example dataClicking Predict sales for the next 30 days will generate a prediction of upcoming sales, as well as set the date on which stock may become critical.Sales prediction for this articleImpact of the sales on the current stock. We run out within 27 days!Information about the confi

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Moderator
9 months ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Troubleshooting Mobile development & proxy service tiersBlog

Troubleshooting There is a small chance that you might run into some difficulty along the way. Since Mobile uses technologies that most developers at Thinkwise are not very familiair with, this troubleshooting chapter should help with the most common problems. Pinpointing the problem is the most important activity, since the vast majority of all problems have nothing to do with the mobile GUI but instead are caused by the proxy service tier, the model, the database or a setting in IAM. 'My service tier won’t run!' If instead of an authentication pop-up an error page shows up, something could be wrong. However, if you entered correct credentials, you might get a 404-not found, because there is no website at this location. Anything other but an authenticaton pop-up or a 404 should not happen. If the authentication pop-up keeps showing up even though you entered valid credentials, the database configuration might be wrong. Re-check the web.config and make sure the webserver can actual

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
5 years ago
Anne Buit
Community Manager
Anne BuitCommunity Manager
published in News & Blogs

Web GUI is now End of LifeNews

The Web GUI has entered the End of Life phase.As per runtime component lifecycle policy, the release of Thinkwise Platform version 2023.3 is the last version to support the Web GUI. In this blog, you can read about the impact of this change in runtime component support. ImpactAny Web GUI that is still in use today will continue to work. However, upgrading to any upcoming Thinkwise Platform version will not be possible. The Web GUI will not support version 2024.1 and up.Thinkwise will only provide critical security updates for about 1.5 years. When Thinkwise Platform version 2023.3 is no longer supported, the Web GUI will enter the End of Service Life phase. Note that the underlying technologies for the Web GUI are aging, security patches may not always be possible.Furthermore, there will be no further updates to support new operating systems, browser versions and such. The Web GUI may cease to function when the operating environment is subject to change.More information about this life

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Anne Buit
Community Manager
3 months ago

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