All the votes are in! 

 

And below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, October 2013 !!!!

 

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.

 

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 - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Steef-Jan Wiggers BizTalk Server 2013: Connect to Window Azure Blob Storage Mandi Ohlinger: "Great "How To" guide! Thank you for including the steps on the Windows Azure Management Portal."
Ed Price: "Steef-Jan gets the edge this month for a fantastic article that focuses on a timely topic... BizTalk 2013 connecting to Windows Azure. An incredibly important senario as Microsoft looks at the future, and it looks a little cloudy." 

Silver Award Winner

 

 Leonid Ganaline BizTalk Integration Development Architecture Tord Glad Nordahl: "This is one amazing article! Leonid has really put all his knowledge and time into this rticle! Well done, my favorite this month!"
Ed Price: "Leonid's article features great explanations and diagrams!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Maheshkumar S Tiwari BizTalk Server: N1 Loop Mapping Mandi Ohlinger: "Makes an N1 Loop look easy. Nice addition to the Wiki!"
Ed Price: "Very thorough look at N1 Loop Mapping! Great article!" 


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Great work from Suleiman and Mohammad, thanks for your contributions. Good luck for November!

 

Guru Award  SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Dan Christian SharePoint 2013: A no Code Solution to Build a Change Management Request Gokan Ozcifci: "I've been always fan of "no code" solutions for SharePoint Server. This is an impressive post with many images and videos at the same time. The Change Management Request has been explained very well. This articles deserves absolutely the first place! Well done Dan!"
Ed Price: "The amount of information here is astonishing... information, videos, and images... it's incredibly impressive! The screenshots sometimes look like headers (making speed reading a bit of a challenge), but if you move through it slowly, you'll understand every concept as Dan presents it! "

Silver Award Winner

 

 Matthew Yarlett SharePoint 2010: Storing Database Connection Settings in the Secure Store Ed Price: "Beautiful images, code, and formatting with thorough directions."
Gokan Ozcifci: "This article describes on a very detailed way how to store Database Connection Settings in the Secure Store Services on SharePoint! It has been written with an easy English who makes this article easier to understand! "

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Benoît Jester SharePoint 2013 : Upgrade a Site Collection (UI and PowerShell) Jinchun Chen: "Good practises and tips."
Ed Price: "Benoit's article is a common scenario, and the formatting allows you to move through the TOC seamlessly. This is also a good example of looking at the topic from different perspectives."
Gokan Ozcifci: "Great step-by-step Benoit! This article is structured and shows the upgrade in many ways! "


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Wow, so much SharePoint magic! Thanks to Sures, Johan JManley, Mohammad and Nilesh for their sensational contributions. Hopefully see some of you again as November Gurus?

 

Guru Award  Small Basic Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Nonki Takahashi Small Basic: How to Rotate a Shape Not from the Center RZ: "This is a very nicely done example showcasing the capabilities of GraphicsWindow"
Ed Price: "Nonki scores again, with another fantastic article! This one goes in depth in rotating objects, including great diagrams to explain the concepts clearly!"

Silver Award Winner

 

 litdev Small Basic: Grammar Basics Ed Price: "All three articles this month have fantastic formatting! LitDev's article digs into the core language elements. Jibba Jabba says in the comments: "It's good to know the language of programmers because every book you read on programming uses these terms. ""
RZ: "Good introduction. Well organized."

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Florian Auer Small Basic: Read and Write CSV Files Ed Price: "Florian's first article features flawless formatting and a great scenario! Jibba Jabba wrote in the comments: "Excellent article. Really helpful stuff." "
RZ: "Very good examples, with nice comments to go with code."


Three Small Basic warriors, three great articles! Thanks and congratulations!

Guru Award  SQL BI and Power BI (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, Power Pivot) Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Jason Brugger Using a View to Mask Multi-Server SSIS Package Configurations KU: "Nice work. "
NN: "Very good technical article with clear explanations"
Ed Price: "Fantastic formatting, great explanations, and great work on the code formatting. An SSIS article takes the top spot this month!" 

Silver Award Winner

 

 MNisharMSDN Exists v.s Existing and Auto Exist in MDX KU: "Content is well structured and to the point."
NN: "Great and comprehensive article"
Ed Price: "The images and table are very helpful!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

 SathyanarrayananS SSRS - Sorting Ed Price: "Sorting is very common, and this is a good walk through. As KU mentions, don't forget to break up articles with a header and TOC. And from the article comments... Saeid: "High quality article!" "
NN: "Very good and thorough explanations"
KU: "Longer articles can benefit from headings or similar tags that help the reader quickly jump to the sections of interest. "


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Thanks Christian, a great article worthy of the competition. Please keep giving! :D

 

Guru Award  Transact-SQL Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Naomi N T-SQL Useful Links Samuel Lester: "A treasure trove of amazing resources! I've already found myself referencing your "T-SQL Useful Links" wiki several times and can see this being just as valuable. I know it represents SO many hours of your efforts and it is greatly appreciated!"
Jinchun Chen: "Awesome. All-In-One."
Richard Mueller: "A great collection of references."

Silver Award Winner

 

 Ronen Ariely Crazy TSQL Queries play time Jinchun Chen: "Really good."
Samuel Lester: "As a long time software tester, this article brings me joy! :) Great job breaking the mold and adding content that gives the reader something they likely have never thought about. After reading this, I immediately started thinking of other areas where we could expand this. These are all outstanding learning exercises and would make for great interview questions as you mentioned. I still consider Pinal Dave's SQL Server Interview Q & A as the best around, but I could really see a section added where you tackle problems like these which require deeper knowledge to solve. "
Richard Mueller: "An interesting and educational collection of snippets."

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Saeid Hasani All-at-Once Operations in T-SQL Richard Mueller: "Very interesting and informative in an attractive article."
Samuel Lester: "Great article! Ask 10 C#/.NET coders this question and see how many get it correct. :) Very strong points in the Silent Death section regarding execution order based on the estimated execution plan. We see this problem trip up many people in the MSDN forum questions and could possibly be a blog/wiki article on its own. "


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Thanks Himanshu and DIEGOCTN for your participation. Your contributions are also loved by all. Please stay with us another month and good luck!

 

Guru Award  Visual Basic Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Reed Kimble How to Draw a Border of ASCII Text in a Console Application Richard Mueller: "Very clever solution. I like this."
Ed Price: "Brilliant formatting, and great explanations, code blocks, and images!"
Mark Rideout: "I (heart) this for nostalgic reasons, plus a very good article!" 

Silver Award Winner

 

 The Thinker Multipoint with the Kinect part I MR: "Very cool to see! "
Richard Mueller: "I found the code difficult to follow. Code commented out didn't help."
Ed Price: "Good depth! I think it could be improved if the code was broken up into sections with more explanations, steps, and result images. This is a great topic!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Reed Kimble How to Write to a Console Window without Wrapping Text Richard Mueller: "Very interesting and informative."
Ed Price: "Important topic that's presented very well!"
MR: "Awesome article structure and educational!"


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

I had hoped Paul would have taken third this month, as his article is a great contribution to TechNet Wiki. Please keep up the great contributions Paul.

 

Guru Award  Visual C# Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Jaliya Udagedara Filter a DataTable based on a Collection NN: "Very nice and simple solution and easy to understand."
CW: "This is a good example on how to use Linq in a creative way. This makes code that otherwise would be long and arduous elegant!"
Ed Price: "Excellent explanations!"

Silver Award Winner

 

 Karl Mitschke Clear System Center End Point Protection exclusions without SCCM Ed Price: "Very thorough. Great Output section!"
NN: "Very useful program. May use some comments in the code"
CW: "This article does show something useful (messing with the registry through c#) but is titled in such a way I don't think I would think this article would be useful for that. Maybe more useful would be a more general article about this? That being said, this seems to address an issue in endpoint protection where it doesn't properly remove old things." 

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Mohammad Nizamuddin Microsoft.NET: SMTP Server Relay setting and sending email using C# code Ed Price: "Good directions and easy to follow!"
CW: "This article accurately demonstrates how one might send an email from c#. This functionality could be useful for a number of applications I do believe the article could be improved by adding a summary/abstract for waht the articl contains. Just jumping straight into configureing an smtp server didn't do it for me."
NN: "Nice and simple article with clear instructions"


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

Thank you Amit for your contributions this month. Hopefully see you again in future months!

 

Guru Award  Windows Phone and Store Apps Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 mcosmin How to transfer files between a Windows Store app and any Windows Phone app Prashant Phadke: "Good example that shows the compatiblity. The initial topic regarding what is TCP is way too much and perhaps out of scope. Maybe a better approach would be to include links to the TCP RFC at the bottom. Including any additional links is also helpful"
Ed Price: "Fantastic explanations! Could benefit from section headers and a TOC."
RC: "Fantastic stuff! A great addition would be demonstrating the PeerFinder to make the connection without having to enter the hostname" 

Silver Award Winner

 

 Thomas Claudius Huber Using the RenderTargetBitmap in Windows Store Apps with XAML and C# Prashant Phadke: "Very nicely written."
Ed Price: "Great formatting, and the images help tell the story!"
RC: "Great explanation of one of my favourite new features in Windows 8.1!"

Bronze Award Winner

 

 fabian.henzler.serwiz.net Testable navigation with MVVM through behaviors on Windows Phone 8 Prashant Phadke: "Step 4 doesn't have DetailsPage.xaml and DetailsViewModel.cs screenshot. The displayed screenshot is for Step 2. The article ends abruptly, maybe add a closing line and add some helpful links if applicable."
Ed Price: "Clear instructions with complementing code snippets and screenshots. Could also benefit from section headers and a TOC."
RC: "If I wasn’t already familiar with behaviors I'd be completely lost. I'd like to see it call out and explain the behavior code up top before going into the general code listing."


Just the three contributors this month. Hopefully see you all again in November!

Guru Award  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Magnus (MM8) WPF: Displaying and Editing Many-to-Many Relational Data in a DataGrid Ed Price: "Very well written and well formatted with a TOC, headers, an image, and code snippets. "
Peter Laker: "Love this piece of work from growing legend Magnus "

Silver Award Winner

 

 Gaurav Khanna Nested menuitem in WPF ToolBar Peter Laker: "Another heavy weight contributor, another sensational piece"
Ed Price: "Great formatting. Would benefit from breaking up the code more and more explanations. Great topic! "

Bronze Award Winner

 

 XAML guy WPF: Watermarked TextBox and PasswordBox Ed Price: "Fantastic topic that's very clear. "
Peter Laker: "It's mine!" 


As above, WPF community just hanging in there!

Guru Award  Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Peter_Stapf FIM 2010 R2: HowTo search for request details in msidmCompositeType Ed Price: "Great formatting on the code, sections, and great images. "
PG: "Nice work!"

Silver Award Winner

 

 Ike Ugochuku FIM 2010 R2: WAAD Connector - Managing the SourceAnchor field in a Multi-Forest Exchange organization Ed Price: "Great detail and explanations!"
PG: "Nice article, but would like to see the procedure to be elaborated just a bit more. Some additional screen shots would be nice. And a very short tech description what is missing to solve the requirements."


We need to drum up some more community members!

Guru Award  SQL Server Database Engine Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Uwe Ricken Delete huge amount of data
from a relation		 NN: "Very interesting article with great code"
Samuel Lester: "Incredible explanation and depth to a question we're seeing more and more often due to data size. Great comparison of different techniques along with why the standard "switch to simple mode" solution won't work in most cases where customers are hitting these bounds."
Ed Price: "Amazing formatting and detail!"
Jinchun Chen: "Good practice."
DRC: "Feedback: • This article is provides a very good information about the topic which is being discussed. • It also provided a sample code which can be tested on SQL instance with sample expected output. • This also talks about other alternate solution and scenarios to which this article is applicable. Suggestions: • Avoid line number in the sample code which needs to be edited in order to execute. • High light the key word which is discussed, also highlight the same in the code sample. Holding an "EXCLUSIVE LOCK (WITH TABLOCK)" on the target table can use all benefits of BULK LOGGED operations. INSERT INTO dbo.bigtable WITH (TABLOCK) (Id, c1, c2, c3) "

Silver Award Winner

 

 Shanky_621 What does 'Log Truncation'
counter value signifies in DMV sys.dm_os_performance
_counters		 DRC: "--The article seem to be incomplete --Doesnt include all the points discussed --Don't use the short forms like : BOL MS Perfmon VLF's AFAIT -- Since the code is wrtten with reference to Adventure works database, include the location to download the adventureworks so that the users could download this."
NN: "Good article but a bit hard to understand"
Samuel Lester: "Great investigative work on this and for digging so deep into it, I learned a lot from your write-up. I emailed a few folks on the Engine team to see if I can find someone who's worked directly on this code. "
Ed Price: "I love the "Suggested Reading" section!" 


Two great pieces! Need more players!

Guru Award  Windows Server Technical Guru - October 2013  

Gold Award Winner

 

 Mr X Record Logon / Logoff Activities on Domain Servers and Workstations Using Group Policy GL: "Simple yet effective. It would be interesting to add additional parameters that can be recorded in the logon and logoff scripts"
Richard Mueller: "Details a simple but effective way to track network usage."
JM: "This is a great article, good work."
JH: "useful"

Silver Award Winner

 

 Mr X Management of SIDs in Active Directory Richard Mueller: "An excellent summary of important information in an attractive article."
GL: "Great topic. This would be very useful if it included a script to detect duplicate SIDs. The "import-module activedirectory" command listed does not work unless the module is installed."
JM: "This is a very good article, nice work."

Bronze Award Winner

 

 Mr X Central Management of DNS configuration compliance and updates GL: "Interesting integration of SCCM compliance with a migration scenario, has several applications."
JH: "great article with good scripts to automate a time-consuming task of updating DNS settings"
JM: "This is an excellent article."
Richard Mueller: "Great to have scripts for this. Could add error logging."


Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

 

 

A great big thanks to EVERYONE who contributed an article to last month's competition.

Hopefully we will see you ALL again in this month's listings?

 

If you have not yet 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:

 

 

Forum announcement links:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/4789c53e-130a-433e-90ab-060bdf0e245b/microsoft-technet-wiki-biztalk-guru-winners-for-october?forum=biztalkgeneral

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c28ea5db-f0c8-4282-b5e1-6d0593d9c101/microsoft-technet-wiki-fim-guru-winners-for-october?forum=ilm2

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/a1d21c87-e076-4f7f-b913-0af8922c1e6a/microsoft-technet-wiki-sharepoint-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sharepointgeneralprevious

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/626917be-5bf7-4722-86a7-bf85a3be5c62/microsoft-technet-wiki-sharepoint-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sharepointdevelopmentprevious

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/8018e904-597c-4c3e-bb41-8da6901cdbf1/microsoft-technet-wiki-ssas-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sqlanalysisservices

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/9242f5d2-02c7-492a-a4bc-23ea0ae24d58/microsoft-technet-wiki-powerpivot-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sqlkjpowerpivotforexcel

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/9eb50947-e4f3-4038-9a7a-af486ef015b0/microsoft-technet-wiki-sql-dbe-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sqldatabaseengine

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/dc8fd44a-961f-4f29-b205-bc15987d7aa1/microsoft-technet-wiki-ssrs-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sqlreportingservices

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/df74a073-9bdc-4659-b884-a8254b0a6820/microsoft-technet-wiki-ssis-guru-winners-for-october?forum=sqlintegrationservices

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/5083c3c4-19fe-48bc-9b34-5ad19d406490/microsoft-technet-wiki-tsql-guru-winners-for-october?forum=transactsql

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/9330bee2-fd54-43b1-a397-805168b6a209/microsoft-technet-wiki-vb-guru-winners-for-october?forum=vbgeneral

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/f8280316-5052-4faa-b2ec-990dd3a6f6cd/microsoft-technet-wiki-c-guru-winners-for-october?forum=csharpgeneral

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/wpapps/en-US/1a3f4a41-3f46-4b40-a2d6-e0ebff8f11c7/microsoft-technet-wiki-win-phone-guru-winners-for-october?forum=wpdevelop

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsapps/en-US/06e2cefc-3bc9-4315-8dd8-aacd7df1574c/microsoft-technet-wiki-store-apps-guru-winners-for-october?forum=winappswithcsharp

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/55240189-d1c2-4147-a034-ad517f96c238/microsoft-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-for-october?forum=windowsserversolutionssdk

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/758ce64b-aa76-4c4e-a9fa-2f3e1940d175/microsoft-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-for-october?forum=winserver8gen

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/db92faa3-a2fa-4d28-9e68-96e72c39a70c/microsoft-technet-wiki-windows-server-guru-winners-for-october?forum=winservergen