Our history

As a group of experienced freelance trainers and consultants we realised that if we could combine our varied skills into a team then we could deliver far more than each of us as individuals. Rock Solid Knowledge was born. 

All of the team had been doing consulting work, as individuals, but we knew we could have a bigger impact for our customers by working together . Plans to form the company began ...

Working out our major offerings and a marketing strategy made us focus on gaps that we saw in the market. And of course, we started to work on our logo.

Our "team-in-a-box" approach seemed quite unique - we would deliver an entire team to work closely with the customer rather than them having to find individuals who might or might not work well together. We didn't realise at the time how big an impact this concept would have on the company later

We went public with Rock Solid Knowledge at DevWeek 2009, offering architecture and design reviews - "Dr Rockman is IN for consultations"

Historically, as individuals, we had always delivered a lot of sessions at DevWeek. Now, in 2009, suddenly the Rock Solid Knowledge logo was everywhere. We landed with quite a splash.

Having seen us deliver technical sessions, we were approached by investment banks looking for tailored, deep technical training for their developers, across their sites globally.

From C# and .NET to web development and software craftsmanship, we started flying around the world delivering classes to help investment banks build highly skilled development teams.

Richard had been a C# MVP for three years earlier but was now deeply involved in distributed systems using both WCF and BizTalk. This led Microsoft to recognise him as a Connected Systems MVP. 

His MVP status was renewed for the next four years until the time pressure of running Rock Solid Knowledge meant him having to reduce the amount of time he spent doing community work.

It was incredible that a year had already passed. Here we were at DevWeek once more and once again Rock Solid Knowledge were delivering a substantial part of the conference sessions.

.NET 4 was in the pipeline and with it a whole new approach to writing asynchronous code. The start of something that has become a Rock Solid Knowledge signature was here

"How do we get our most senior developers to engage with new technologies?" This was the problem presented to us by an investment bank. "Create a Code Challenge competition" we told them.

A three day event with a day of training to introduce a new technology and then teams have to go away and build something according to a defined specification. The best solution wins prizes!

The developers were really excited by the idea and we were on-hand to provide guidance and advice should they have issues. Overall the events were a great success.

A video conferencing company asked us to help them go beyond their specialisation for a customer. Central Bedfordshire Council wanted an innovative way to allow people to access their services from local libraries. 

We met with them in early September and they told us they had to show their customer a demo in two week's time. Andy and Richard were speaking at the Basta! conference near Frankfurt the following week but threw themselves on the project between sessions to create a prototype of the system. The customer was impressed and so we started to plan the production system.

We now had the full requirements of the initial launch of the Customer Access Terminal (CAT) kiosk product and so started the development of the production system.

Using Windows 7 Embedded, WPF and WCF we started to build a kiosk that integrated video conferencing with a number of other devices that allowed people to complete applications for council services without having to go to council offices. We, also, now had interest from Cheshire West and Harrow councils.

This year we took on the DevWeek keynote with four of us showing four different ways of doing asynchronous/parallel programming. Andy turned 40 at the event.

We showed the audience that there were many options for async processing. We demonstrated  .NET API, Scala, GPU and cloud ending up with running the Tube Challenge on 96 cores in virtual machines in Amazon Web Services.

Cheshire West council deploy the first three of an eventual twelve CAT kiosks into libraries around their region

Deploying into libraries meant that less mobile people could access council services any time they need to. Disabled Blue Badge applications could now be completed on the spot due to the close integration of devices and video

We helped First Databank to expose their medical interaction database to health professionals via a REST API.

First Databank are a premier supplier of medical/drug interaction data to health professionals. Their database orientated solution can now be hosted centrally and accessed via an API.

Windows 8 was due for released later in the year and so we had a T-Shirt marking the resurrection of COM as a technology

Previously seen as a legacy technology, the programming model for Windows, WinRT, brought COM back front and centre. However, it never really caught back on and, as we predicted, .NET continued as the way most developers, on the Microsoft platform, built applications

Having attended our one day MVC workshop at DevWeek, the CTO of ICSA Software asked us to spend a day exploring architecture options for updating their products

ICSA Software wanted to bring on new functionality using modern approaches to web development. This was the start of a close working relationship that carries on to today

Rich presented "Whats new in WCF 4.5" at TechEd Amsterdam

As a Connected Systems MVP, Rich was asked to show people all the new functionality that they had added for the .NET 4.5 release of WCF

The US Social Security Administration (SSA) needed a kiosk solution for their clients to access benefits with assisted self service. With our partners YorkTel we delivered our solution into pilot.

The SSA had extra requirements over and above the standard kiosk features that we built into a secure, remotely administered, access point for their services in food banks, veteran's centres and  SSA offices

ICSA Software asked us to build them a modern web application for their next generation of products. We used our team-in-a-box model to deliver a skilled, cohesive team for the development

This meant most of the company was now in full time development, building a Single Page web Application (SPA) at a time when framework support was minimal.  Much of the JavaScript infrastructure we take for granted these days had to be built from scratch for this project.

Having seen Andy and Rich presenting on async programming at DevWeek, Apress approached us to write a deep technical book for developers (the book would publish as Pro Async Programming with .NET)

After some negotiation, Andy and Rich started to write the book, weaving it around their development commitments.

After several months of development, always working closely with ICSA Software, the SPA we had been writing, Connect, went live. Customers loved the new site and the increased usability of using a SPA.

This was the founding of a long term relationship that is still going strong today

Kev hit his 12 year anniversary of speaking at DevWeek. Although we had spoken at a number of other conferences, DevWeek was always a favourite. 

This year we focussed on web development and, as the book was approaching first draft, lots about async programming 

We got news that the book was heading to the bookstores on New Year's Eve. It was a great feeling of accomplishment and all the better as the reviews came in and were all very positive.

Writing a technical book turned out to be a lot more work than we first anticipated but a very rewarding experience

This was a momentous month; we took the big decision to expand the company. This involved us hiring employees for the first time and getting physical offices. 

If we wanted to do more than four of us plus trusted people we knew, we knew we had to do something radical. The next three months were filled with office hunting and putting out job adverts

At the start of September, we moved into our new offices in Aztec West, Bristol. We had taken on two recent graduates, Toyan and Sam and so six of us took up residence in an office that would take eleven - "plenty of room for expansion" we thought

Having Toyan and Sam in the office was fantastic. As we were from a training background we did intensive training and had them work on their first project - a Twitter reflector to retweet our posts through the company account

The creators of IdentityServer approached us to become the European commercial partner for their open source project. We took on Scott Brady and started to work on support and development offerings.

We had known IdentityServer team for a number of years and, now that we were starting to grow, it seemed an obvious solution for the commercial side of the product

HouseMark, who provide services to the housing sector, asked us to help them move their existing Domino based authentication infrastructure to IdentityServer and modern security protocols.

Not only did we have to replace their Domino system but also support all of its integration points: some of them custom and some of them standard (such as SharePoint). This was the start of another long-term relationship.

ICSA Software approached us to build an iPad based companion app to their Blueprint product. Realising that they were likely to need an Android version down the line we elected to use Xamarin.

Xamarin development meant we could leverage our extensive C# skills and apply them to a new platform. Working closely with the customer's design team we started to build out the app.

We'd realised early on that IdentityServer really needed an administration application for managing users, clients and resources. We started development of AdminUI to provide that application to make IdentityServer just as usable as non-open source identity providers.

A key goal was to simplify management of clients so that AdminUI would provide guidance for setting various types of clients correctly. This idea became a guiding principle of how we then built other features.

So it turned out that an office for eleven was just not big enough. With mobile development and identity work we were going to have to have room for at least sixteen. And so we took out our first lease on a building, moving into Vantage Office Park, Bristol

Suddenly we were in an office four times larger than previously with our logo on the front door. It was a great feeling.

As we were now doing Xamarin development on more than just the ICSA Software project and Mark was Xamarin certified. We became Xamarin partners.

We also set other mobile team members on the road to Xamarin certification

HouseMark asked us if we could do a workshop on Azure Machine Learning. We had been working with Wintellect and Microsoft delivering Machine Learning courses at universities and so built a workshop around HouseMark's data.

The workshop was delivered by Sam, one of our first two employees, as he had a background and interest in AI and machine learning.

We had started doing a lot of work with the open source CMS, Umbraco. It was only natural, therefore, to become Umbraco Gold Partners.

Emma had joined us in February to lead our Umbraco efforts and we redeveloped both rocksolidknowledge.com and identityserver.com to run on Umbraco

AdminUI 1.0 was finished and so we announced it at the conference SDD 2017

We had been doing a number of custom implementations of IdentityServer for customers and AdminUI was the perfect companion for these products to give the customer a simple way to administer their installation

We had contacts at the Gloucester History Festival and so realised that they desperately needed a new website. With our Umbraco background this was a perfect fit to allow them to manage the content as the festival progressed.

Unbeknown to the festival staff we also built them a companion mobile app using Xamarin Forms. This was the first time we realised how powerful it was having a central CMS driven data store with multiple delivery channels (in this case web and mobile running off the same managed content)

We had done a number of small projects using Angular but now HouseMark wanted to re-engineer core pieces of their infrastructure. For this, Angular was the perfect solution.

The application was complex with many data defined calculations having to be executed from the JavaScript in the browser. The structure of the data entry forms was also data driven. The application went live allowing HouseMark customers to perform there Q1 data entry in the new application

Until this point, all twenty employees at Rock Solid Knowledge were software developers. We realised that we needed someone to specialise in the sales and marketing efforts for our products and services.

Kieran immediately set about automating the sales pipelines and getting our digital marketing strategy moving

Working with existing customers and seeing requirements generated when doing custom build-outs of IdentityServer we released AdminUI 2.0.

Apart from support for .NET Core 2.0 we also hugely expanded the number of users that AdminUI could manage efficiently. One customer was running happily with over 20 million users

Released our first component for IdentityServer4, to enable IdentityServer4 to support the SAML2 protocol.  Enabling enterprises to include SAML clients in a single sign-on solution for both SAML and OpenID Connect and OAuth.

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When JetBrains created a new programming language, Kotlin, we thought it was something worth looking at. As a result Kevin did a talk at DDD Wales on an Introduction to Kotlin.

We have worked with JetBrains for some time now both in terms of discussing partnering and using their tools. When Kotlin was proposed as an Android development language by Google we knew there was definitely going to be some traction

We attended the largest European Conference on Identity and Access Management. Scott delivered two talks: Blockchain and Identity and OAuth Device Flow.

It was interesting exploring new technologies and protocols, such as; FIDO2, UMA and the customer need for IAM and CIAM. We also learned a lot of new acronyms.

Having rewritten their data entry system. Housemark asked us to look at the reporting side of their products. Again using Angular, we shipped a dashboard oriented reporting site.

The site allows customers to customise their dashboards and generate custom reports and data extracts.

As the direction of the company had changed towards products and software development, we felt it was time to introduce a fresher feel to the Rock Solid Knowledge logo.

Our focus on products and content driven apps and websites didn't really fit the "rocky" look of the original logo. Working with designers we came up with a new, clean lines, logo and branding.

Delivered our first trail application to Bridgnorth Art Trail.  Providing a trail for visitors to the town to find all 12 statues celebrating Bridgnorth's connection with steam locomotion.

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We released the next version of our IdentityServer management tool AdminUI.  This new version featured support for Device flow and Auditing.  The Auditing feature provides a full audit log of all administrators activities, and can also be integrated into IdentityServer itself providing a full audit trail of users single sign-on activity.

Released our second component for IdentityServer4, to enable IdentityServer4 to support the WS-FED protocol, ideal for SharePoint integrations.  This component allows IdentityServer to act as an Identity Provider (IdP) using WS-Federation, bringing cross-protocol single sign-on and allowing you to use IdentityServer to log into your legacy applications.

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We have now doubled our office space by knocking through to next door, creating two new meeting rooms and a more spacious working environment.  The new area also contains a large kitchen and seating area for staff to get away from their desks and enjoy lunch with colleagues.

Rock Solid Knowledge celebrates its 10th year of trading.    

Delivered more sessions at SDD 2019 on Asynchronous programming, Polly , GC and many more.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us on the stand to discuss all things IdentityServer

Released AdminUI 2.4, support for new client wizards and bundled IdentityServer

Another year providing the website and mobile application for Gloucester History Festival