The Microsoft TechNet Guru Awards! (March 2015)

All the votes are in!  

 

And below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, March 2015 !!!!

 

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 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Steef-Jan Wiggers BizTalk Server 2013 R2 Instrumenting an orchestration with ETW Sandro Pereira: "Really nice article, I love it, nice use of the BizTalk CAT Instrumentation Framework. And once again, the article well detailed and excellent formated in terms of images and text format. Good work Steef-Jan." Ed Price: "Fantastic depth in the Introduction, Scenario, and Wrap Up!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Steef-Jan Wiggers View BizTalk Send Port Subcriptions Sandro Pereira: "Really useful script! Good job Steef-Jan."Ed Price: "Good context setting in the introduction (the image helps a lot)!"

 

Guru Award  Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Tracy Yu-MSFT The Ultimate Tools to work ith RCDC in FIM Søren Granfeldt: "Very nice and a great help for all of us struggling with RCDC's" AM: "Thanks for posting Tracy! RCDCs can be very frustrating to troubleshoot."

Silver Award Winner

 

Wim Beck FIM2010: Protect passwords in configuration files Søren Granfeldt: "Nice technical explanation and good approach" AM: "Far too many FIM environments I find plain text passwords stored in scripts - great contribution. Another helpful resource"

 
 

Guru Award  Microsoft Azure Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

saramgsilva Avoid Nightmares Using EF First Migration in Azure Mobile Services JH: "Another nice one from Sara. Definitely worth a look." Ed Price: "I love the use of embedded links to the related library articles! And the article is rich with descriptions, well-formatted code with great commenting, and clarifying images. Plus a link to the source code. Fantastic job on this!" Alan Carlos: "Great! Very detailed!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Ken Cenerelli Creating an Microsoft Application Insights resource Alan Carlos: "Great article!" Ed Price: "Incredibly thorough how-to article!" JH: "Application Insight is something everybody should have on his radar. Ken provides a nice article to get started."

Bronze Award Winner

 

Prashant Mahajan Azure: MVC application to refer js from blob JH: "Nice alternative on deploying JavaScript on Azure. Worth a look in some deployment scenariosEd Price: "This is a great topic! Could be improved on with code formatting and a See Also section. Good article!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • The Way to Migrate to Hyper-v/Azure by Samir Farhat
    Ed Price: "I like the formatting, use of images, and connecting it into the series at the bottom! Could use section headers (with TOC) and a See Also section. Great clarity in this article!"
    JH: "An article with some potential about moving non-Microsoft virtualized environments to Hyper-V or Azure."

 

Guru Award  Miscellaneous Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

XAML guy Convert and Edit Microsoft Office Live Meeting Recordings Alan Carlos: "Thanks XAML guy! Very yseful!" Durval Ramos: "This article was "welcome", but "a little late". Simple and clear. Well done, Peter!" Ed Price: "Fantastically crafted instructional guide!" Richard Mueller: "Great information. Good use of article guidelines. I like the images."

Silver Award Winner

 

Andy ONeill Silverlight: Trouble Shooting Installs Alan Carlos: "Cool Andy!" Durval Ramos: "This article is very detailed, has a demo and use description in different browsers, but could change sections order or maybe split article: "What's Silverlight?" and "Trouble Shooting Installs". Well, one more time... Good job Andy!" Ed Price: "Incredibly exhaustive with a lot of great supporting sections!" Richard Mueller: "Good use of article guidelines, like "See Also" and TOC."

Bronze Award Winner

 

Tom Mohan Zen coding with Visual Studio Durval Ramos: "It would be welcome if added images and references about your use in VS" Ed Price: "Great topic with some great code formatting! Could benefit from section headers and a See Also section. Very helpful article!" Richard Mueller: "Very interesting. This tool could prove useful, once you get used to it."
Guru Award  SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Murugesa Pandian Simple understanding on SharePoint Provider Hosted App Model Jinchun Chen: "Nice article" Hezequias Vasconcelos: "" KB: "Please correct typos. I like the explanation on difference between app only permissions and user permissions" Ed Price: "Great explanation! The diagrams are very helpful!" Margriet Bruggeman: "Interesting start, but I feel this article needs a lot more work to become really useful. Not because the article is bad, but because of the fact that the topic is so complex."

Silver Award Winner

 

Melick JSOM List Operations in SharePoint Apps in a proper way (Provider Hosted and SharePoint Hosted)–CRUD Margriet Bruggeman: "Clean implementation of a very useful JS library. I really like this approach" Hezequias Vasconcelos: "The sound is great content for development in SharePoint" Ed Price: "Good topic with helpful code snippets! Could benefit from Headers, a TOC, and a See Also section. "

Bronze Award Winner

 

Michaelle de las Alas Expandable/Collapsible Headers Solution for SharePoint Pages Hezequias Vasconcelos: "The page management and scheduled SharePoint content is a great resource." Ed Price: "It's simple, well-written, and very helpful for the community! Could benefit from headers, a TOC, and a See Also section. Great topic!" Margriet Bruggeman: "I like it. A useful idea that is easy to implement." 

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

Guru Award  Small Basic Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Philip Munts Small Basic and the Raspberry Pi Michiel Van Hoorn: "Wonderful idea and good write up. Would be cool so have something running with the "regular" Raspbian." RZ: "This is incredible. Detailed step-by-step instructions and pictures/screenshots. Makes me want to jump up and try it myself now. But I will save it for a nice rainy day project to work with my boy. I am sure he will be all in awe!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Yan Grenier Small Basic: Timeline for the games Michiel Van Hoorn: "Great advance article on timelines. Very usefull to those looking for more complex games." RZ: "This is a difficult topic, especially for beginners. But Yan explained it very well with details and examples!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Ed Price - MSFT Small Basic on TechNet Gallery Michiel Van Hoorn: "Very useful "baseline" for those who want to blog / post." RZ: "Very nice explanation of the TechNet Gallery"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

Guru Award  SQL BI and Power BI Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Jens Vestergaard SSIS Script Task and Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) Script RB: "Great article, that applies to any kind of web content." PT: "Good quick reference example. Thanks for submitting it."

Silver Award Winner

 

Ricardo Lacerda SSIS: Data maintenance with Microsoft Azure SQL Database PT: "This is a very complete tutorial on setting up CDC which makes the process quite clear. Thnaks" RB: "Great article !"

 

Guru Award  SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Visakh16 Parsing Out Data From Flat File With Inconsistent Delimiters in SQL Server Durval Ramos: "Very useful. Good job !" Ed Price: "Fantastic job on the code formatting, in-depth descriptions, and robust use of images!" AM: "Thanks for presenting multiple approaches to solve the problem. It would be good to see a second part describing the format file." DRC: "This is a good article which provides different ways to import the data to SQL, But this article needs some modifications. Suggestions: • It would be helpful, if mentioned on which version of SQL server and Visual studio scenario was tested • We might encounter errors while using the format files, for example we get the below error if the format file doesn’t have blank space (character ) at the end of each line Msg 4862, Level 16, State 1, Line 10 Cannot bulk load because the file "C:\temp\good.fmt" could not be read. Operating system error code (null). • So it will be helpful if you can provide a sample format file and TSQL script along with the possible output which can be tested and compared. • The sample query and the format file is not yielding the right output. Screenshots shown in the article has invalid values (for example ID coulmn has invalid values). Format file need to be fixed to get the right data. • The format file under section “Files With Text Qualifiers” is also invalid and the data is not imported properly. • Implementation of import using the SSIS package needs more details about how to make the delimiter consistent, Attaching a sample package would be helpful. "

 

Guru Award  System Center Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Noah Stahl Make System Center Orchestrator Text Faster than a Teenager using PowerShell and Twilio Ed Price: "Wow, I love the breakdown of sections. As Alan wrote in the comments, "Wow! Great article!""

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X How to educate your users to regularly reboot their Windows computers Ed Price: "I love the table and use of code snippets and images! Great article!"

 

Guru Award  Transact-SQL Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Saeid Hasani T-SQL: How to Sort a Column that Contains Character-Separated Numbers Durval Ramos: "Great article! The samples in this article are very enlightening." Richard Mueller: "Good use of guidelines. Good images. Grammar needs work."

Silver Award Winner

 

Saeid Hasani T-SQL: Troubleshooting When a Column Alias that Created in the SELECT Clause Cannot be Used in the ORDER BY Clause Richard Mueller: "Great use of article guidelines. I like the images and "See Also". Good explanation of an advanced topic." Durval Ramos: "An interesting topic and also have T-SQL script on TNGallery, about related issue in MS Connect. Good job!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

sql-pro T-SQL: SQL Server Agent Job Execution Status Durval Ramos: "This article has interesting content, but needs to be better worked." Richard Mueller: "A great idea. We may need more references/links."
Guru Award  Visual Basic Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Reed Kimble Simple Multi-User TCP/IP Client & Server using TAP Durval Ramos: "This article offers a complete description about an TAP implementation and has a download code on MSDN Code. Good job!" Richard Mueller: "I liked this article a lot. Good use of article guidelines. A lot of useful links, but some could be collected in an "Other Resources" section."

Silver Award Winner

 

.paul. Factorizing Quadratic Equations (practice and solver) Durval Ramos: "Very good. Well formatted article and has images that clarify how to work equations. " Richard Mueller: "A fun article with good images."

 

Guru Award  Visual C# Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Isham Mohamed Setting custom Messages in user defined Exceptions Carmelo La Monica: "Good articles and sample code!" Jaliya Udagedara: "A short and to the point article. Answers a common problem."

Silver Award Winner

 

Tom Mohan .NET: Equality Features Jaliya Udagedara: "Great article. Has links to MSDN when needed. Definitely enjoyed reading." Carmelo La Monica: "Article very detailed in all parts, congrats!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Vithal Wadje Constructors and Its Types in C# Carmelo La Monica: "Well done in all its content , and very exhaustive of the types of constructors of a class" Jaliya Udagedara: "Explains Constructors in detail. Please do format the code as Andy suggested."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

Guru Award  Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Davut EREN Turkish Ninjas Team Council Center Durval Ramos: "Great collection of Turkish articles!!!" Richard Mueller: "Amazing collection of links." Ed Price: "Great job in using this article to build out Turkish content and encourage the community!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Alan do Nascimento Carlos TechNet Wiki - Images Durval Ramos: "Very useful for use in "Wiki Ninjas" Blog posts." Richard Mueller: "A great collection of fun images." Ed Price: "I can see this article being well used as we leverage these images in blog posts!"
Guru Award  Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Damien Allan Make a Styled Button in XAML for Windows Universal Apps JH: "Styling has always been special in XAML-based applications. This article shows nicely how to style a button in Blend in universal apps." Ed Price: "Great explanations and how-to content, with helpful images and code!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Carmelo La Monica Part four: The control Maps on Windows Phone 8. JH: "Another article about working with the maps control in Windows Phone 8. Nice to see another one in this series." Ed Price: "Fantastic and exhaustive explanation of the Maps control!"
Guru Award  Windows PowerShell Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Noah Stahl Make System Center Orchestrator Text Faster than a Teenager using PowerShell and Twilio Alan Carlos: "Wow! Great article! Congratulations!!!!" Ed Price: "What a powerful solution with great details and helpful images!"

Silver Award Winner

 

Richard Mueller PowerShell Script to Search Active Directory Ed Price: "This article is amazing, due to great details, a couple of helpful tables, lots of supporting images, and a plethora of related links at the end!" Alan Carlos: "Very useful!!!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Dan Christian Add MSG file metadata to a SharePoint list using PowerShell Alan Carlos: "Excellent!" Ed Price: "I love the supplemental video and helpful images!"

 

Guru Award  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Andy ONeill Uneventful MVVM Ed Price: "Amazing depth on this article! I love the See Also and Other Resources sections! Astonishingly great article!" Peter Laker: "Supurb article Andy. Nice work again."

Silver Award Winner

 

Magnus (MM8) WPF: Implementing Global Hot Keys Ed Price: "I love the breakdown of sections and clear descriptions!" Peter Laker: "Excellent topic and well explained Magnus!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Tom Mohan Asynchronous data binding using IsAsync and Delay Peter Laker: "Great tip Tom, thanks for your contribution!" Ed Price: "Very valuable topic!"

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

  • RadioButton Alignment by Andy ONeill
    Ed Price: "Incredibly helpful resource that people will return to use!"
    Peter Laker: "Thanks again Andy for more XAML goodness!"
Guru Award  Windows Server Technical Guru - March 2015  

Gold Award Winner

 

Pierre-Alexandre Braeken Active Directory - Clone a Domain Controller in Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V (VM-GenerationID) Mark Parris: "The principals of cloning a DC." JM: "This is an excellent article on cloning a DC, nice work and thanks for the contribution." Richard Mueller: "Excellent topic and great images."

Silver Award Winner

 

Mr X Netstat for Beginners JM: "This is a great article on netstat, thanks for your contribution." Richard Mueller: "Very good tutorial on this important tool. I like the images and tables." Mark Parris: "Good Insight"

Bronze Award Winner

 

Pierre-Alexandre Braeken Set up a virtual infrastructure at home with Windows 8 + Hyper-V Manager and a Synology DS412j Mark Parris: "Nice how to article." JM: "Although not aimed at Windows Server users, this is also an excellent article." Richard Mueller: "Extensive documentation for all the steps."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Bitlocker Drive Encryption by Darshana Jayathilake
Mark Parris: "Funcdermentals of Bitlocker."
JM: "This is a good article on Bitlocker, however it needs revision for clarity."
Richard Mueller: "Good images. Grammar and spelling need work."

 

--------------------------------- 8< -------------------------

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

Hopefully we will see you ALL again in April 2015'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:

TechNet Guru Competitions

Forum posts:

  1. Azure
  2. Azure
  3. Azure
  4. BizTalk
  5. BizTalk
  6. C#
  7. FIM
  8. Power Pivot
  9. PowerShell
  10. SharePoint 2010
  11. Small Basic
  12. SQL Server
  13. SS DBE
  14. SSAS
  15. SSIS
  16. SSRS
  17. Store App
  18. System Center
  19. System Center
  20. System Center
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  26. TN Wiki
  27. T-SQL
  28. VB
  29. Visio
  30. Windows Phone
  31. Windows Server
  32. Windows Server
  33. Windows Server
  34. Windows Server
  35. WPF