Rock Solid Knowledge
New
Umbraco Spark
Posted: Friday, 20 March 2020
We recently sponsored and attended Umbraco Spark, the Bristol-based Umbraco conference that focuses on forward-thinking and technical innovation
Locking & async/await
Posted: Tuesday, 10 December 2019
You may have noticed that the C# compiler gets very upset if you try to use an `await` inside a `lock` statement. There is a reason for this but what if you need synchronization when calling async methods?
CODECABIN19
Posted: Monday, 18 November 2019
Last month Karl Tynan was lucky enough to be accepted and attend a fantastic event for Umbraco developers called CODECABIN...
Codegarden19 - Karl's review
Posted: Thursday, 30 May 2019
Karl's review of Codegarden19, the official Umbraco developer conference in Odense, Denmark...
Dynamic image colors with SkiaSharp
Posted: Tuesday, 16 April 2019
This article explores how to use SkiaSharp to change the colours of images at runtime
Adding data binding support to Xamarin Forms layouts
Posted: Monday, 18 March 2019
This article explores how to add collection data binding support, similar to Xamarin's ListView, to other types of UI elements.
Catch Me Who Can
Posted: Monday, 14 January 2019
Using a mobile device to enhance town trails for all, and providing insights into how the trail is used. Creating opportunities for targeted marketing
The umBristol Umbraco V8 hackathon
Posted: Tuesday, 18 December 2018
As part of the umBristol Christmas Party day of events, our developer, Karl Tynan, recently attended the Umbraco V8 hackathon on a boat in Bristol.
Decoupling views and navigation Xamarin.Forms
Posted: Thursday, 4 October 2018
Navigation in Xamarin.Forms is tightly coupled to the UI. How can you go about breaking that coupling and making your ViewModels more testable?
Special combo: Emma's Umbraco talks tour
Posted: Wednesday, 19 September 2018
Emma talks about the talks she will be touring at various Umbraco festivals over the next few months, using her latest talk “Special Combo! When Umbraco and Mobile App Development combine”...
Awaiting multiple tasks effectively
Posted: Wednesday, 23 May 2018
Working with the Task API and async and await makes consuming asynchronous operations very straightforward. However, what if I want to process several asynchronous operations concurrently?
In Dances the PKCE Protocol
Posted: Wednesday, 11 April 2018
Read how to use the PKCE protocol to allow you to achieve secure authentication in your Xamarin applications using the OidcClient library...
Mobile app development is key of 2018
Posted: Wednesday, 7 February 2018
Many of us have seen the rise in mobile use, it now seems strange that you would be without a smart phone and also not to use it to order products and help keep our lives in order.
Xamarin.Forms tip: How to restrict entry view
Posted: Monday, 22 January 2018
As a Xamarin Forms developer sometimes all you need is a way to ensure that users of your application only enter specific characters into Entry views. For me, it was to restrict the entry to numeric characters and a single decimal.
Creation of an Alexa skill using an internal HR API
Posted: Thursday, 23 November 2017
With the automation of HR management here at Rock Solid Knowledge we wanted to create a new way to remember who was meant to be in the office. So with a recent office purchase of an Amazon Echo, I decided to take on the development of an interactive program that could be invoked via Alexa...
Gloucester History Festival is a huge success thanks to app
Posted: Friday, 10 November 2017
This year's Gloucester History Festival was the most successful ever - thanks to an amazing line-up of famous speakers and the new, easy to use website and mobile app provided by Rock Solid Knowledge...
Gloucester History Festival companion app
Posted: Thursday, 14 September 2017
The Gloucester History Festival is an annual event in and around Gloucester. In this case study, Rock Solid Knowledge describe our process for developing a CMS-driven companion app…
Something about nothing
Posted: Tuesday, 12 September 2017
I must admit when I first saw the list of new language features for C# 6 like many I wasn’t that impressed, especially off the back of async/await. This last month I have at last started my first new real C# 6 project and I must say while the features have not been earth shattering they are actually a joy to use…
Unit testing decorator base classes
Posted: Tuesday, 12 September 2017
When using the decorator pattern it is a common practice to create a base class implementation of the abstraction that simply forwards all calls to the decorated class. This means that in the actual functional decorators, once you derive from this base class, you only need to implement the behaviour for the specific methods...
Let's stop the async suffix BS
Posted: Thursday, 7 September 2017
There is a common pattern that is used in .NET APIs where anything that returns a Task has the suffix Async…
Working with CancellationToken and Dispose
Posted: Wednesday, 30 August 2017
CancellationToken were introduced in .NET 4.0 as a general purpose cancellation framework. It is often associated with Task as that was the first API to it. However, it is, in fact, independent of Task and should be used wherever you are supporting the concept of cancellation as async APIs you may call with be designed with it in mind…
