The Microsoft TechNet Guru Awards! (July 2014)

All the votes are in! (finally)

 

And below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, July 2014 !!!!

Results were a few days late this month, due to many judges being on vacation. 

 

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 - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Steef-Jan Wiggers Securing BizTalk endpoints leveraging Sentinet API Management Part 1 Ed Price: "Incredibly epic with great descriptions and diagrams! Another amazing article from Steef-Jan!" Sandro Pereira: "Again good job Steef-Jan! Makes me want to try Sentinet" TGN: "Stentinet is a great asset to BizTalk. Thanks for sharing such a great article."

Silver Award Winner

 

Idar H BizTalk Server 2013: How to publish a REST web service with POST TGN: "Great guide, and welcome to the TechNet Wiki Idar!" Ed Price: "Wonderfully clear instructions and images on this important topic!" Sandro Pereira: "A great example."

Bronze Award Winner

 

Murugesan Mari Chettiar BizTalk: Pattern to on-board increasing business partners TGN: "Well done Murugesan, great article with a lot of good tips!" Ed Price: "Amazing job on the diagram and orchestrations!" Sandro Pereira: "A valid pattern, great job Murugesan, but configuration.xml is probably not the best option."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

Guru Award  Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - July 2014  

Silver Award Winner

 

Scott Eastin How to Calculate Manager Reference Value from PeopleSoft SQL View PG: "This article is not discussing clasic, traditional way of managing reference/manager attribute. Nor is it discussing why the default way of working might fail. Furthermore this article uses multiple un support techniques." Ed Price: "Good sample that can be applied to other data as well! Because this article received two negative votes, it auto-dropped to Silver. There is an excellent debate about the merit of this unsupported method in the article comments! Thank you to Scott and Peter for adding transparency to this topic!"

 

Guru Award  Microsoft Azure Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Mr X How to set up Endpoints to Microsoft Azure VMs JH: "Well written with a lot of step-by-step pictures!" Ed Price: "Another great "How to" from Mr X! Clear instructions and the images help a ton! It would be good to include Azure overview articles and portals in the See Also section. Great job!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X How to provide a temporary and secure remote access to Microsoft Azure VMs JH: "Great article, especially the recommendations at the beginning." Ed Price: "There's a lot of great depth in this article! Remote access to Azure VMs is an important topic!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

saramgsilva Datatable design view for Azure SQL Database Ed Price: "Good introduction and the arrows help make it super clear what to look for in the images! Important topic and good conclusion!" JH: "Short but informative article. It would be useful to mention that some networks (especially corprate networks) block the access to this feature."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • Microsoft Azure and Availability Sets for VMs by Mr X
    JH: "Great explanation of availability sets. It would be worth to mention were you can find this feature in the Azure portal."
    Ed Price: "The images pop. Great conclusion! Could benefit from a See Also section. Great article!"
  • Download you Azure website with Kudu by M.I. Isham Mohamed
    JH: "Short overview about a widely unknown feature. Some more information or pictures would be nice."
    Ed Price: "Short and interesting. Could benefit from more information,and maybe an example use case. The image is great. Thanks for bringing more light to this engine!"

 

Guru Award  Microsoft Visio Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Durval Ramos Reverse Engineering a SQL Server Database using Visio SR: "Blog mentions that the "Demo will use Visio 2013" but that's not correct information. This feature is CUT from Visio 2013 and available till 2010." AH: "It has good details. I like that it gives step by step process to use Reverse engineering using MS Visio. If Anything if the Author can change the screenshots that are in spanish to englisth that would be great." Ed Price: "Great article! Durval addressed the issue and updated the article to reference Visio 2010 instead. You can see the conversation in the article comments. It's great to see authors interact in the article comments and make improvements like this!"

 

Guru Award  Miscellaneous Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Durval Ramos Automating a Data Paging using VBA on Excel Ed Price: "Wow! The Introduction is great, there's a ton of information in the "Building" section, the red circles and lines on the images help a ton, a video (in Portuguese), and then the icing parts are the References, See Also, and Other Languages section. Amazing job on this article!" Richard Mueller: "Great links. A well formatted article." TGN: "Great article and well explained, I would maybe try to put some effort in to changing the screenshots to english."

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X Hyper-V and DHCP Guard feature Richard Mueller: "Great documentation of a new feature. I like the images." Ed Price: "Great job on the diagram!" TGN: "good article, but a short explaination about what the feature do would make it even better!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Mr X Hyper-V and Router Guard feature TGN: "Great article and explaination!" Ed Price: "Good information and use of images! Great job!" Richard Mueller: "Great documentation of a new feature."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • •How to execute a SQL query in Powershell by Brian Nadjiwon
    TGN: "Good snippet, but the article needs more content."
    Ed Price: "Good code formatting. Could benefit from more explanation and then breaking the code apart to explain how it works. Good contribution."
    Richard Mueller: "Interesting code demonstrating a query example. Should this be in the TechNet Gallery?"

 

Guru Award  SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

How to setup, configure and test SQL 2012 SP1 SSRS with SharePoint 2013 Ed Price: "This article from Dan is amazing! Fantastic job! Great use of images and great explanations along the way!" Benoît Jester: "Another EXCELLENT article by Dan! A complete guide to install SSRS w/ SharePoint 2013!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Naveen Sasi Retreiving Server Date using SharePoint JSOM Jinchun Chen: "Interesting solution!" Ed Price: "Good explanation and good to have the See Also section. It would be nice to have the code broken up more and explained. Good job!" Benoît Jester: "Thanks for the code,coul be useful!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Johnathan Lightfoot Web Sensitive Files and SharePoint 2010 Ed Price: "This is a good article with instructions and images. Thanks for removing the personalization (per the comment from Shanky). It could be improved with headers, a TOC, and a See Also section. The explanations near the top are very helpful!" Benoît Jester: "Interesting article on "Sensitive Files". Good to know!" Jinchun Chen: "Nice"

  

Guru Award  Small Basic Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Ed Price - MSFT Small Basic Survival Guide Michiel Van Hoorn: "Oh the overload!" RZ: "Very nicely categorized and organized. Way to go!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Nonki Takahashi Small Basic: Character Set - Unicode RZ: "Very well explained. I wager that many programmers can't quite explain what's unicode and utf-8 :)" Michiel Van Hoorn: "Great article on this fundamental element in programming"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Nonki Takahashi Small Basic: Controls Michiel Van Hoorn: "Practical topic with good examples"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

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

Gold Award Winner

 

Firdous S -MSFT Getting Started with Forecasting and Hindcasting in Power View PT: "Nice demonstration of this functionality using a simple set of data. Well done." MR: "Some formatting issue - I fixed some issue in blank lines and too large pictures, but it should bulleted points should be fixed better" RB: "Interesting and thorough walkthrough of the new Forecasting/Hindcasting feature in Power View for Office 365. It's based on an publicly available dataset so you are able to experiment yourself with these features" NN: "Nice article with very good images" DB: "Very Interesting"

 

Guru Award  SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Sean Gallardy Cell Level Encryption With Always On Availability Groups DB: "Interesting" Jinchun Chen: "Excellent." Ed Price: "Wow, great code and depth! The down side is with the personal "blog-like" tone, it's harder to collaborate on a Wiki article. (What if someone adds a section or a link to a similar article on a newer version? Is it still personal?) Anyway, the content is fantastic!" NN: "Very interesting article" Samuel Lester: "Great write-up, very informative, and outstanding technique when building up the explanation of the problem." DRC: "The article contains lot of information and a very clear explanation of each and every steps. It also provides all the necessary links for related topics. An important change which need to be made is : its not Always ON, its AlwaysOn. "

Silver Award Winner

 

Shanky How to Install SQL Server 2012 SP2 on Standalone Instance of SQL Server NN: "Nice article" Samuel Lester: "Super informative, this will help a lot of people to walk through the process." DRC: "<> This article explains the detailed steps of install and uninstall of Service pack. But i'm not sure whether we need such a detailed explanations for applying service pack. <> Considering the number of SP install issues, this article would helpa  lot of users overcome the issue. " Ed Price: "This is a great "how to" article! It could be improved with a grammar pass. (Feel free to ask me or others in advance so we have time to help.) While this does duplicate some existing Library content, I like how it links to the related articles at the bottom and this does add new depth, which can be very helpful! Another great article!"

 

Guru Award  System Center Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Mark Scholman Orchestrator – Check System Center VM Snapshots Ed Price: "Good explanation, and great image and code formatting! It could benefit from explanations of what the code is doing and from a See Also section that links to related Wiki articles. Great job on this article!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X How to use Orchestrator to automatically recover Website failures by checking the HTTP status code  Ed Price: "What an epic article! Great job on the descriptions, images, and script! In this case, the table really pops for me and helps me understand the scenario better!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Mr X How to uninstall or remove SCCM client Ed Price: "Good! Short and sweet. Could benefit from a See Also section. Good job!"
Guru Award  Transact-SQL Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Ronen Ariely Transact-SQL: Join Order Ed Price: "Great topic with an amazing use of code snippets and images! I love the Conclusions section and the Resources section is fantastic!" JS: "Good article, well formatted and a good starting point for someone not being familiar with those pieces." Samuel Lester: "Great write-up, explanation, and examples! " Richard Mueller: "Great information on an advanced topic. Well explained with good examples and references." Jinchun Chen: "Great. " 

Silver Award Winner

 

Naomi N T-SQL: Find the Peak Hour Samuel Lester: "Outstanding! Creative solution, nice comment about the importance of a good design, which would have made this a much simpler task. " Richard Mueller: "An advanced topic using new techniques." Jinchun Chen: "Nice" JS: "Please provide the execution plans of you are already comparing the performance results." Ed Price: "Great Problem Definition and good See Also section! Also, great code formatting! It could benefit from explaining what the code's doing more. Great article!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Visakh16 Get Current Fiscal Year Dates JS: "Please provide the parameter instead to pass IN current_timestamp instead of assuming the getdate() values." Samuel Lester: "Handy little script to add to your T-SQL developer toolbox! Thanks for sharing!" Richard Mueller: "I needed better explanation." Ed Price: "Great topic and great job on the code! Could benefit from more explanation of what's happening in the code, as well as a See Also section. The explanations at the end are very helpful!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • Formatting T-SQL queries output from JSON model by Durval Ramos
    Ed Price: "This is a good topic with great code formatting, images, descriptions, and it's very well supported with References, See Also links, and even a Portuguese translation! Great job!"
    Richard Mueller: "Well formatted article."
    JS: "I am not a fan of providing formatting with the result set of a query. This should be done on the business or as a last resort on the presentation layer."
  • T-SQL : Find Word Matched Count by Hasham Niaz
    Ed Price: "Good formatting and code snippets! It could benefit from more explanations of what the code's doing. Great article!"
    Jinchun Chen: "Nice"
    Richard Mueller: "I needed better explanation."
Guru Award  Visual Basic Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

.paul. Simple_database_LogIn_system MR: "Great article! Well written. Good note on plain text password. Don't forget to disable controls on hidden panels!" Ed Price: "Amazing! The formatting is incredibly clean, and great response in the comments by addressing the encryption concern with a great section in the article! It would also be good to have the code sample available on the MSDN Gallery. Fantastic article!" Richard Mueller: "A very useful article that deserves to win. Could use more comments in the code. The "See Also" should link to other Wiki's."

  

Guru Award  Visual C# Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Eyal Shilony A Client/Server Application Using Named Pipes Peter Laker: "An old technology that is mistakenly overlooked these days. This is a great article that I hope breathes new life into named pipes." Ed Price: "Great article and topic! Great explanations and code formatting. Could benefit from more explanations of what the code's doing, a See Also section, and an Additional Resources section. Great job! A lot of wonderful depth in this article!" NN: "Good article"

Silver Award Winner

 

Jaliya Udagedara Writing a Very Basic Dynamic Query using Expression Trees NN: "Very nice explanation" Peter Laker: "Brilliant article, well worth the read, thanks Jaliya." Ed Price: "Fantastic job breaking up and explaining the code snippets. Very easy to follow! Great use of linking to (and leveraging) the MSDN Gallery! This is a great article!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Ronen Ariely C Sharp: Multi-Types Application Ed Price: "Great job on the images, code snippets, and diagram! The Introduction, Case Study, and Resources sections are wonderful! Great article!" NN: "Very interesting article" Peter Laker: "A nice overview of some basic differences. Thanks Ronen."
Guru Award  Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Durval Ramos SQL Server 2014 Portal NN: "Great new portal" Richard Mueller: "A great portal with useful links." Ed Price: "Great job on this portal! It's very important to have a one-stop shop for articles about the latest versions, including SQL Server 2014!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Dan Christian How to add images to your TechNet Wiki article Ed Price: "This is a fantastic end-to-end article, from OneDrive strategies to using tags! Great job on this!" NN: "Very useful tips" Richard Mueller: "A very well formatted article, on a useful topic."

  

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

Gold Award Winner

 

saramgsilva Authentication using Facebook, Google and Microsoft accounts in Universal Apps using MVVM JH: "Just amazing! Love the amount of code snippets." Ed Price: "Incredible depth! The flow diagrams and code formatting help a lot. Great Description section!" Peter Laker: "Excellent and vey useful article from a well respected author."

Silver Award Winner

 

Saad Mahmood Expression Blend - Playing with Sample Data (WPF , Windows Phone) JH: "One of my favorite features when working with XAML. Nice to see an article about it." Ed Price: "Great formatting and use of images! The final few sections really give a lot of great information! As you see in the comments, Sandro added it to the TechNet Wiki magazine!" Peter Laker: "I'm sure we have otehr examples of this in the Wiki, but gratefully received anyway!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

SubramanyamRaju.B WP8.0 vs WP8.1 :All about new package.appxmanifest file at beginners level Peter Laker: "Very useful introduction, nicely presented, thanks!" JH: "A lot of information and pictures, but needs some reformatting." Ed Price: "Good content and great use of images! Could benefit from a grammar pass. Good job!"

  

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

Gold Award Winner

 

Magnus (MM8) WPF: Implementing Custom Authentication And Authorization KJ: "good stuff!" Ed Price: "Great introduction and depth in the code!" Peter Laker: "Epic post from Magnus. Pleny of code, just enough comment."

Silver Award Winner

 

Andy ONeill Thinking outside the box with the Adorner KJ: "good stuff!" Ed Price: "Wonderful topic! Could benefit from explanations of what the code's doing. Great job!" Peter Laker: "Excellent article, as always, from Andy! I adore adorners!"

 

Guru Award  Windows Server Technical Guru - July 2014  

Gold Award Winner

 

Mr X How to prevent rogue DHCP servers on your network  JM: "This is an excellent article on preventing and detecting rogue DHCP servers, nice work." Ed Price: "Incredible depth in this article!" Richard Mueller: "A great Wiki, with good structure and images. A great topic for system administrators." Philippe Levesque: "I like the article, as it's a problem I seen a lot of time in real life (dhcp rogue)" 

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X How to get the HTTP status code for a Website running on a specific Web server using Powershell JM: "This is a good article, thanks again for your contributions." Ed Price: "Good explanation!" Richard Mueller: "Very useful code, giving administrators a great tool to monitor their web sites. Credit should be given to Lee Holmes."

Bronze Award Winner

 

Mr X How to enable and configure DHCP MAC address filtering Philippe Levesque: "Really good documentation ! " Richard Mueller: "A very good article. Needs a "See Also" section to reference related Wiki articles." JM: "This is a good article on how to enable MAC address filtering." Ed Price: "Good article. I especially love the table!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month: