Rock Solid Knowledge
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
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?
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?
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...
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…
