Posted: Friday, 12 March 2021
I have worked with a lot of C/C++ programmers over the years, who have wanted to take up or convert to C# in particular for a multitude of reasons, but have never done so. Most could not believe that a company would pay them their expected salaries during the transition. I managed to do it, and this article is my bit to encourage those still willing that it is very, very possible.
Posted: Monday, 22 February 2021
In this post, I am going to talk about the process of refactoring a gulpfile (a JavaScript file that is read by Gulp, which contains instructions on how to complete tasks) to keep tasks DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and reusable, while producing multiple bundles for different use cases.
Posted: Tuesday, 2 February 2021
Blazor WebAssembly is a new UI technology from Microsoft that allows developers to create single-page applications using C# and .NET utilising a component-based architecture
Posted: Monday, 11 January 2021
When you’re an inventive company, you want your employees to be spending their time on fresh new ideas, not repetitive queries. Learn how Rock Solid Knowledge built a customer service helper bot for Garden Games, powered by Umbraco, KHAOS Control and Microsoft LUIS.
Posted: Wednesday, 16 December 2020
You might have heard of "machine learning". Maybe it was through an advert for an online course or someone complaining about the dreaded “Algorithm” that rules most of online life. We’ve been running a weekly Machine Learning Club to skill up our developers in this space
Posted: Tuesday, 1 December 2020
As an employee of an engineering giant, I enjoyed all the perks of working for a large organisation. Then earlier this year, I left after working there for a little over two years to join Rock Solid Knowledge. A risky and bold career move, some might say.
Posted: Tuesday, 17 November 2020
I have never worked from home before, and 2020 has changed how I work and think about working within a development team. Find out how Rock Solid Knowledge has helped us to adapt to the new "normal"...
Posted: Friday, 23 October 2020
Being able to write clear, professional technical documentation is vital in the software industry. Learn how we have worked hard to raise our writing standards up to the same level we expect in our code. This is the second in a two-part series of articles.
Posted: Tuesday, 20 October 2020
If you are a developer, you will know your role is not purely about writing code. Being able to write clear, professional technical documentation is vital in the software industry. Rock Solid Knowledge have worked hard to raise the standard of the technical writing of our team. This is the first in a two-part series of articles.
Posted: Thursday, 2 July 2020
What is Tailwind CSS? What is a utility-first CSS framework? Find out how switching from bespoke CSS, Bootstrap, or other frameworks can help improve your front-end development productivity and maintenance.
Posted: Thursday, 9 April 2020
We have been awarded Umbraco Contributing Gold Partner status for our significant contribution to the Umbraco open source project and community...
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
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?
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...
Posted: Thursday, 30 May 2019
Karl's review of Codegarden19, the official Umbraco developer conference in Odense, Denmark...
Posted: Tuesday, 16 April 2019
This article explores how to use SkiaSharp to change the colours of images at runtime
Posted: Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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.
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
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.
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?
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”...
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?
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...
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.
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.
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...
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...
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…
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…
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...
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…
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…
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