The Microsoft TechNet Guru Awards! (March 2014)

All the votes are [finally] in!  

 

And at last, below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, March 2014 !!!!

 

The TechNet Guru Awards celebrate the technical articles on TechNet, contributed from valued wiki authors like YOU!

Each month, the contributions are scored by a panel of judges (5 per category, 2-3 in each are MS experts), and the winners of each category are showered with love and attention from all corners of TechNet.

See the links at the bottom, to find out more about the competition and how to enter.

 

We have picked the top three highest scored contributions for each category to bestow our awards upon.

The awards are in gold, silver and bronze, the gold obviously being the top winner of the category.

The last column is just a few of the comments judges made during the judging process.

In some cases, we have not obtained permission to use the judges names, so they have been reduced to initials.

 

My fellow wiki ninjas will be digging deeper into some of these articles in this blog series, so watch out for those.

Starting this month you will notice some articles are marked as failing to meet our minimum bar for quality or content.

Any of our judges can exercise their right to veto an article, if they do not feel it meets minimum requirements for a medal.  

When this is the case, we will at least give an indication of the reason, so you understand why.

 

A big thank you also to the other authors who did not make the top three of each category.

Some articles only just missed out, so we may be returning to discuss those too, in future blogs.

 

Guru Award  BizTalk Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Tomasso Groenendijk Using BAM in the ESB Toolkit Ed Price: "Incredibly valuable and very well written! Great article!" Mandi Ohlinger: "A custom BAM dashboard - LOVE it! Another great ESB addition to the Wiki." TGN: "Nice one, I really liked this one, explains how to use the ESB together with BAM, great work and well explained!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Steef-Jan Wiggers Windows Azure BizTalk Services: Pulling Messages from a Service Bus Queue Ed Price: "This is amazingly well written with beautiful images and formatting. Great job!" TGN: "Azure, Azure, Azure! Nice one Steef-Jan, people are waiting on articles like this. Good job, and thanks for the contribution!" Mandi Ohlinger: "A very informative How To. Screen shots are very helpful."

Bronze Award Winner

 

boatseller Detecting a Missing Message Mandi Ohlinger: "GREAT addition to the Wiki and to any user who suspects missing messages. The BizTalk support team can use this orchestration. " Ed Price: "I love the visuals on the orchestration implementation! Important topic!" TGN: "Nice article, great to see a solution to detect missing files."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Guru Award  Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Eihab Isaac FIM 2010 R2 BHOLD: Non-BHOLD Approval Process Ed Price: "Very thorough explanations! Great formatting and colors on the tables and code snippets! And the images are also helpful!" PG: "Nice article, we need more of these."

Silver Award Winner

 

Micah Rowland FIM:How To Use PowerShell to View a Metaverse Object's Connector's Attribututes Side By Side PG: "Nice article, nice format. well written" Ed Price: "Good code snippet and use of code comments. Could use more explanations and maybe breaking the code into sections with more information about each section. Good job!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Giriraj Singh FIM:Delete Bulk Expected Rule Entries Using FIM OTB features Ed Price: "Good procedural steps! It could benefit from more explanations, a grammar pass, and some images. Good article!" PG: "Short but nice article."

 

Guru Award  SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Matthew Yarlett SharePoint: Use PowerShell to find Fields using a Managed Metadata TermSet Jinchun Chen: "Good article." Ed Price: "Although this is Matt's shorter article this month, this is an incredibly important topic, and the code is perfect! As Dan says in the comments: "Matthew Yarlett has done it again!! IMHO when it comes to SharePoint powershell you are second to none." This is a great article!" 

Silver Award Winner

 

Rahul A Shinde SharePoint 2013: Deploy and apply theme to SharePoint sites with PowerShell Ed Price: "Fantastic explanations and use of images!" 

Bronze Award Winner

 

Matthew Yarlett SharePoint: Testing Email Alerts in UAT and DEV Environments Jinchun Chen: "Nice! It can be used for troubleshooting SharePoint Incoming/Outgoing related issues too." Ed Price: "Wow! This article is astonishingly thorough!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Guru Award  Small Basic Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Nonki Takahashi Small Basic: Centering Text in Graphics Window RZ: "Clearly written explanation with nice graphics to go with it." Ed Price: "I love having the three options like this! And the images really bring it to life! The links to the shared programs (with their source code) really help if you want to dig deeper and learn more!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Nonki Takahashi Small Basic Known Issue: 23589 - Controls.GetTextBoxText() Returns CR+LF as Newline from Multi-Line Text Box in Local but CR in Remote RZ: "Bugs are always hard to track down, especially the unknown unknowns :( Good job on hunting it down!" Ed Price: "This acts as a valuable KB article! Great addition to the troubleshooting library!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Nonki Takahashi Small Basic: Expression RZ: "Good introduction to expressions" Ed Price: "Short and sweet intro to Expressions. Thanks, Nonki!"

 

Guru Award  SQL BI and Power BI Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Michael Amadi A Practical Example of How to Apply Power Query Data Transformations on Structured and Unstructured Datasets NN: "This is a terrific tutorial on Power Pivot with very helpful images. Great article" Ed Price: "This is a fantastic combination of Power Query and Power Pivot... a valuable contribution!"
Guru Award  SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

chandra sekhar pathivada managing database backups across all the instances without maintenance plan Samuel Lester: "Chandra, outstanding contribution and information! Your SSIS package handles many of the shortcomings of Maintenance Plans. MPs were originally created to assist DBAs with the more common administrative tasks, but as the scale continues to grow across enterprise environments, we're all forced to write our own enhanced versions such as this. Thanks for the addition and please do add to the Gallery if you haven't yet." Jinchun Chen: "Nice. It is suggested to add error outputs in the package to handler unexpected errors." NN: "Good article. The SSIS solution can use a bit more explanation. Also See Also section is missing" DRC: "This is good article, The only this which can be corrected is : ==> This can be achieved using “maintenance Cleanup Task • Maintenance Plan has a control flow item “maintenance Cleanup Task” to delete the old backup files based on age of the backup, but it creates the problem when it deletes the full database backups based on n no.of days leaving all the dependent intermediate differential and transaction logs which are useless. "

Silver Award Winner

 

Shanky Understanding Logging in Tempdb.Is Tempdb re-created or rebuilt after SQL Server restart NN: "Very good article with an interesting analysis" DRC: "This article is good and provides lots of detailed information along with sample query and screenshot. The screenshot of few need few more details (files of model are missing) This article can be broken down into 2 1) understanding tempdb recreation 2) Logging in Tempdb 1) understanding tempdb recreation:- This is not concluded properly. The article doesnt talk about the physical files which are recreated even if we delete the tempdb files " Samuel Lester: "Shanky, very nice article on the internals of TempDB! It was tough judging this month as both articles were very informative contributions!" 

 
 

Guru Award  System Center Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Mr X How to manage VM pinning within a Hyper-V cluster by combining the use of System Center VMM and Orchestrator Ed Price: "Mr. X, this is another incredibly thorough article! Fantastic job!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Idan Vexler Create Custom XML For OSD In SCCM   Ed Price: "Love the list of requirements! Very thorough in dividing each step!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Omar Lopez (loplim) SCOM 2012 - Create Alert / Monitor Based on Windows event ( Administrator login alert ) Ed Price: "Good use of images. Could use a TOC with sections and more descriptions. Good job!"
Guru Award  Transact-SQL Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Jayakumaur (JK) Understanding IDENTITY in SQL Server Ed Price: "Wow, what a competitive month! This article is amazing, with thorough explanations in each section!" Richard Mueller: "A good tutorial on an important feature of T-SQL."

Silver Award Winner

 

Durval Ramos Paging a Query with SQL Server Ed Price: "Durval's article is fantastically thorough and easy to follow!" Richard Mueller: "Very useful concept when populating controls from a query, which should improve performance. I like the images. Well done."

Bronze Award Winner

 

Naomi N T-SQL: Split String with a Twist Richard Mueller: "Very intersting problem with an original solution." Ed Price: "A very powerful and well-articulated solution from Naomi!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • Split Date Range into Months by Ronen Ariely
    Ed Price: "I love the Introduction and Case Study sections!"
    Richard Mueller: "I needed an explanation of the Numbers table and what it is."
  • Fully automated SQL Server Restore Script by Praveen Rayan D'sa
    Ed Price: "Good set up and code, but it would be even better with the code broken up and thoroughly explained. Good article!"
    Richard Mueller: "I suspect code is rarely required to restore full backups. Restoring full plus incremental backups (transaction logs) is more of a challenge."
Guru Award  Visual Basic Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

The Thinker   Exporting and Importing Wireless Settings Using Netsh in VB.NET SB: "Code could be formatted better, task is something I can see as potentially useful although I would prefer a bit more narrative description and comments in the code explaining why it was done a certain way, although the code is simple enough to work through." MR: "Great tool code!" Ed Price: "This is a good contribution! One way to improve an article like this is to explain the parts of the code more in depth, as a way to introduce each snippet (and maybe dividing a block up more). Then you could link to the Gallery iteam if the reader wants to access the entire snippet at once. The images are also very helpful! Great job!" Richard Mueller: "Perhaps this code should be in the gallery. There should be more explanation in a Wiki."

  

 

Guru Award  Visual C# Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

João Sousa ASP.NET WebAPI 2 - Stream Windows Azure blobs NN: "Very nice tutorial and also can be downloaded from the Gallery" Ed Price: "I love to see this ASP.NET content! Each step is very clear! Great code formatting!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Raghunathan S C# Code Compilation at Runtime from C# Windows Forms Application Ed Price: "Good descriptions and code formatting. It could benefit from a TOC. Great article!" NN: "This looks like an interesting article, but too short and the code is hard to read in its present format"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Raghunathan S Creating a Simple logging class with System.Diagnostics namespace in C# NN: "Good article, but too short" Ed Price: "This is a pretty good article. It could benefit from a TOC and more descriptions around what the code is doing and why. Good job!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

Guru Award  Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Matthew Yarlett Wiki: Basic Image Formatting using Pixlr BL: "This deserves credit as much for the idea as for the actual article - many authors contribute from computers that may not have authoring tools installed and this simple online solution has the potential to iprove quality a lot." Richard Mueller: "Excellent explanation of a useful tool for Wiki authors. A "See Also" section would be useful." PG: "Nice artilce, well done, nice layout. Great!" NN: "Good article"

Silver Award Winner

 

Durval Ramos VBA & VBS Portal NN: "Very good new portal about VBA. Introduction may be improved a bit" Richard Mueller: "A great collection of Wiki articles. Excellent use of recommended features in a Wiki article." PG: "Nice article good start!" BL: "Another great initial compilation of relevant resources. Would be very interested in seeing how this develop over time."

Bronze Award Winner

 

Mr X Wiki: System Center Orchestrator Portal NN: "Good new portal. Missing See Also section with links to other portals" Richard Mueller: "A good collection of articles. This Portal adds a lot to the TechNet Wiki." PG: "Nice and neat article? Suggestion to add more references to related articles and platforms on Wiki." BL: "great initial compilation of SC Orchestrator resources. Hoping this will grow over time as the product has a few other active Wiki contributors."

 

Guru Award  Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Isham Mohamed Pin Windows Phone 8 app to start screen on first launch. Peter Laker: "A very useful and informative article! Also, Nice use of fonts and images." Ed Price: "Good explanation, but it could benefit from a TOC and tweaked formatting. Good job!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Ibraheem Osama Mohamed Coming from an asp.net background, let’s build our first Windows Store Application Ed Price: "Great job on the formatting, explanations, and code snippets!" Peter Laker: "Excellent primer for those moving from asp.net and all beginners."

Bronze Award Winner

 

mcosmin The Performance Analyzer Paradox Ed Price: "This is a good philosophical article, but it would be richer with examples and visuals. " Peter Laker: "Nice story, good reading, very worthy entry and gratefully received!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • Application rating reminder in Windows Phone by Rahber
    Peter Laker: "Great tip! This is just the kind of thing we look for!"
    Ed Price: "This is a good bit of content, but the font is large, centered, not formatted into sections, and it reads more like a blog post than a Wiki article. Good content though!"

 

Guru Award  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Magnus (MM8) WPF/MVVM: Handling Changes To Dependency Properties In The View Ed Price: "Nice, thorough topic with good explanations! Could benefit from code formatting. Great article!" Peter Laker: "A nice primer on a fundamental aspect of xaml. Great layout, images, descriptions, etc."

Silver Award Winner

 

dev hedgehog Trick To Use StaticResource With Path Peter Laker: "A very useful and commonly pondered subject. Thanks for a great contribution!" Ed Price: "This is a great solution with good code formatting and code comments!"
Guru Award  Windows Server Technical Guru - March 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Mr X How to manage your DC/DNS servers with dynamic IPs in Windows Azure JM: "This is an excellent article, however you need to change all instances of the term "on-promise" to "on-premise."" JH: "really detailed, very complete with scripts added" Richard Mueller: "This might be the best article I have judged. Code formatting could be improved, but otherwise an outstanding contribution."

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X How to assign a private Static IP to a Windows Azure VM JH: "excellent, concise, good topic" Richard Mueller: "Excellent documentation of the use of very new tools to manage IP addresses." JM: "Another excellent article, thanks much for your contributions!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Mahdi Tehrani Customize DST time zone configuration across the forest with GPO JM: "This is an excellent article, however you need to change all instances of the term "Daylight Time Saving" to "Daylight Savings Time."" JH: "good info, great illustrations and writing" Richard Mueller: "Original work for an tricky problem. I think the script should run as a Startup script instead of a Logon script on the clients. A "See Also" section and links would help."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

---- 8< ----

A huge thank you to EVERYONE who contributed an article to March's competition.

Hopefully we will see you ALL again in April 2014's listings?

If you haven't contributed an article for this month, and you think you can create a more useful, clever and better presented wiki article than the winners above, here's your chance! :D

Best regards,
Pete Laker

More about the TechNet Guru Awards:

 

Links to forum posts:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/9cc4797d-a0be-420d-8824-49fb3edf55e2/aprils-technet-wiki-biztalk-guru-winners-announced?forum=biztalkgeneral

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e8739d45-8093-4ee3-9f1b-e650c278e232/aprils-technet-wiki-fim-guru-winners-announced?forum=ilm2

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/8263b9f4-d550-4603-b6cb-fa8a0f3b458a/aprils-technet-wiki-sharepoint-2010-guru-winners-announced?forum=sharepointgeneralprevious

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/90d607d7-bfad-471f-8742-b2156acc4946/aprils-technet-wiki-sharepoint-2010-guru-winners-announced?forum=sharepointdevelopmentprevious

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/6ba5b9e3-aeed-401f-93c3-c29154927cdc/aprils-technet-wiki-small-basic-guru-winners-announced?forum=smallbasic

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/6eeada7b-a224-486c-a639-77609ce70b01/aprils-technet-wiki-ssas-guru-winners-announced?forum=sqlanalysisservices

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/206884ff-272d-4be5-93ea-0068d8e479e1/aprils-technet-wiki-power-pivot-guru-winners-announced?forum=sqlkjpowerpivotforexcel

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/6f51bf13-364d-4145-852d-bb8a4ef07884/aprils-technet-wiki-ss-dbe-guru-winners-announced?forum=sqldatabaseengine

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/15f6365a-4edf-44f4-9ec5-13d760df840c/aprils-technet-wiki-ssrs-guru-winners-announced?forum=sqlreportingservices

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/ef6d73d8-9fcb-446c-b485-c34c3051bd38/aprils-technet-wiki-ssis-guru-winners-announced?forum=sqlintegrationservices

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/1dbb0dcf-4194-424b-a9d1-dd04cd2f6878/aprils-technet-wiki-tsql-guru-winners-announced?forum=transactsql

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/35fa847a-1a8c-44ad-b070-c6f141b0b616/aprils-technet-wiki-vb-guru-winners-announced?forum=vbgeneral

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/b2d4a82f-e77b-4be5-bb36-c1d828acef7a/aprils-technet-wiki-c-guru-winners-announced?forum=csharpgeneral

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/wpapps/en-US/10f2deff-6a26-4a6b-8ecc-223c354a795b/aprils-technet-wiki-windows-phone-guru-winners-announced?forum=wpdevelop

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https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/23883a15-4ce9-4aa7-8d59-f0e0012a6215/aprils-technet-wiki-wpf-guru-winners-announced?forum=wpf

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/4843c536-14c1-4212-851b-bfa47662a2cc/aprils-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-announced?forum=windowsserversolutionssdk

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/da543940-8426-49ad-8c38-737217a81ce7/aprils-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-announced?forum=winserver8gen

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/9a2852b2-ed8f-4b83-93b8-e6b422b1d85a/aprils-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-announced?forum=winservergen

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/bdfa2deb-3866-45b3-aaa8-4b8a78836aa9/aprils-technet-wiki-sql-server-guru-winners-announced?forum=sqlgetstarted

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/2cdb2092-93c0-471e-9c4b-b78aba901527/aprils-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-announced?forum=winserverDS

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/76197b12-f84a-4bea-8b17-2f2628f30d03/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=configmgrgeneral

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ce0b1631-9e8a-4a48-bbfb-138f2107fb31/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=configmanagergeneral

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/c953e8a9-3b94-4109-8a62-1e5804aaeec3/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=operationsmanagergeneral

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/75c081f0-c906-488c-b16e-8b9deb9bd282/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=dataprotectionmanager

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d81002b8-84a7-4cca-bcdb-ea5cd35eb723/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=scogeneral

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/be5dc5c4-8e4f-478f-9bfe-9e9946b9e04e/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=systemcenterservicemanager

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/e9d67599-9234-4437-ad77-732079e807d1/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=virtualmachinemanager

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e18b763a-2003-4891-98c3-3d171ee73118/aprils-technet-wiki-system-center-guru-winners-announced?forum=appcontroller

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https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/485403aa-6dcb-4365-9802-a67a510daead/aprils-technet-wiki-tn-wiki-guru-winners-announced?forum=tnwiki