The TechNet Wiki Community Council is in motion and marching forward!

This is part of a series:

1. Enter the Council
2. A New Hope
3. Council Strikes Back (this blog post)
4. Return of the Council 

We especially want to welcome one new member (since "A New Hope"):

• Craig Lussier

Here are all our members....

Microsoft Employees (5)

1. Ed Price - Profile
2. Peter Geelen - Profile
3. Bruno Lewin - Profile
4. Markus Vilcinskas - Profile
5. Brent Groom - Profile

Observers:

• Leonardo Ponti - Profile

External (8)

1. Peter Laker (aka XAMLguy) - Profile
2. Margriet Bruggeman - Profile
3. Richard Mueller - Profile
4. Philippe Levesque - Profile
5. Tord Nordahl - Profile
6. Zoltán Horvath - Profile
7. Naomi N - Profile
8. Craig Lussier - Profile

And what are we doing? We're working on the TechNet Wiki Community Council Areas of Focus.

The basic idea is that we're pushing forward and making progress in a lot of areas. 

We've shifted a few people to different Areas of Focus...

1. Guidelines & Best Practices
• We're currently tag-teaming this area
2. Portal Growth - Yagmoth (& Richard Mueller)
• Focus: The Adoption and Evangelism of Wiki Portals.
• Richard is planning on how to get more portals made for each technology
3. Cross-Linking Expansion - Richard Mueller (& Naomi N, Peter Laker)
• Richard and Naomi are planning
• Naomi is encouraging people to add See Also sections themselves
• Peter is exploring automation possibilities
4. Feature Requests & Bugs - Ed Price (& Richard Mueller) 
• Maintaining this page: Feature Requests for TechNet and MSDN Profiles and Social Platform Tools 
• Maintaining this page: Wiki: Known Issues  
• Ed and Richard updated our list of bug fixes and features to get implemented
• We're waiting on a Wiki platform update to drive the requests some more.
5. Spam, Plagiarism, & Article Deletion - Peter Geelen (& Naomi)
• We're at a good place with this right now, building a strong framework
6. TechNet Wiki Featured Articles - Ed Price (& Yagmoth)
• Ed created this framework: TechNet Wiki: Featured Article Teams 
• Ed has been featuring the TechNet Guru gold medal winners on the English Wiki
• Next: New rounds on Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese
7. TechNet Guru (Leveraging Forums) - Peter Laker (& Ed Price, Naomi N)
• We're going strong with more judges, and we successfully finished our third month!
• Naomi has been evangelizing the contest and checking for plagiarized content
• Ed has been featuring the winners
• Peter hosts the judging and publishes the contest and the results on the blog, Wiki, and in each forum
8. Wiki Ninjas Blog Planning - Peter Laker (& Ed Price)
• Peter Laker started taking over the blog author scheduling from Ed
• Peter is planning more possibilities
9. TechNet Wiki Discussion Forum Community Growth - Tord
• Improve this forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tnwiki/threads 
• Tord is currently planning the possibilities
10. General Community Projects and Social Initiatives - Zoltan
• Zoltan is currently planning the possibilities.
11. TechNet Wiki International Council - Bruno Lewin (& Ed Price, Yagmoth)
    • We created an article about the steps to getting your language established as a Wiki instance: Wiki: How to Get a New Language Started or Expanded on TechNet Wiki
    • We invited the initial members to join the council. private Forum in place
    • We created an article that explains the council and lists the members: TechNet Wiki International Council
    • We have a French Forum to test effectiveness of language specific Wiki Forums. Bruno/Yagmoth need to figure roll out plan
    • Next step: kick-off, establish communication channels, get input on what areas members want to work on
12. TechNet Wiki Advisory Board - Ed Price (& Monica Rush) 
• Resurrect and grow the board: TechNet Wiki Advisory Board
• This was re-launched. We added some communication processes
• Next step: Finish onboarding with communication tools
13. Wiki Ninja Belt Rankings - Ed Price (& Margriet Bruggeman)
• Lots of work to do to add new belt holders, to update current belt holders, and to reward them some more
14. Collaborating with Microsoft Field Representatives - Brent Groom
    • To leverage their content and customer interactions on TechNet Wiki.
    • First Brent is working to get TechNet Wiki involved in the Field Representatives' existing community initiatives
15. Leveraging User Groups - Craig Lussier (& Zoltan)
    • To leverage user groups as pockets of communities (focused on individual products) who can work together on TechNet Wiki content creation and evangelism
    • Craig is currently working on building out some micro-tasks to get this going
    • Zoltan has some ideas and will help make progress

A lot of amazing things are going on, and I'm super excited to see all this progress! Let us know if you want to help with the council members with any of these individual efforts (or if you have any questions)!

   - Ninja Ed

Hello Community!

I am Hezequias Vasconcelos and early today my activities as an author on the blog wikininjas. It will be an honor to join this group and I'm sure that each article is written in the wiki community is of great importance and help people. The author is critical because it motivates this helps, write, do what you love and exercise the imagination.

Thanks for the opportunity

It's time for another July TechNet Guru winner!

Congratulations to Isenthil, our Windows Phone Development Guru winner for July! See the TechNet Guru Contributions for July 2013.

This is Isenthil's second Guru gold medal!

About Isenthil: Software Engineer, .NET Geek, and Windows Phone Fanboy

Here is the gold-medal-winning article:

Location API in Windows Phone 8

Now let's look at all the winning articles: 

Windows Phone Technical Guru - July 2013

Congratulations to Senthil for taking Gold, and to Ken and Lohith for Silver and Bronze. Some great subjects covered in July. Let's hope August is even better!

And here's an excerpt from the article:

Capabilities

The Location capabilities has to be set in the app manifest file for the app to work fine when using the location APIs.

If the Location capabilities are not set in manifest file, the following is the behaviour.

1. If the App is targeted at Windows Phone 7.1, then a status error will be received when trying to start the GeoCoordinate Watcher.

2. If the App is targeted at Windows Phone 8, then the app will throw UnauthorizedAccessException.

Setting the location capabilities is pretty easy, you will need to include the ID_CAP_LOCATION in the Capabilities section of your WMAppManifest.xml . Note that you should also be setting the ID_CAP_NETWORKING.

If you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012, you can add the capabilities with the GUI editor as shown in the below screenshot.

===================================

Read the rest here:

Location API in Windows Phone 8

Thanks to Isenthil for your great contribution to the TechNet Guru contest! You can read about all the July winners here: TechNet Guru Awards - July 2013

Also, for the August Guru competition, see TechNet Guru Contributions - August 2013.

Please join me in congratulating Senthil on his second gold medal Guru win!

Are you a Wiki Ninja? http://technet.com/wiki

    - Ninja Ed

It's time for another July TechNet Guru winner!

Congratulations to Jaliya Udagedara, our C# Guru winner for July! See the TechNet Guru Contributions for July 2013.

Juliya came onto the TechNet Guru scene strong in July with submissions for multiple categories! This is his first Guru gold medal, and I suspect it won't be his last!

Amazingly, this article combines three Microsoft technologies... VC#, SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), and Silverlight.

About Jaliya: A Microsoft Partner, he has a passion for technology and loves Microsoft .NET framework. He uses C# as his proficient and primary programming language, but he still loves to spend some time with C/C++ as well.

Here is the gold-medal-winning article:

Connecting to SSAS Cube using Silverlight

Now let's look at all the winning articles: 

Visual C# Technical Guru - July 2013

Despite four entrants for this category, Jaliya won all three awards for July! We may limit the number of awards per month in future results as we still figure out the perfect format for these awards. But for now, congratulations go to Jaliya for an outstanding collection of contributions! Love also goes to Karl Mitschke, chilberto &  Mohammad Nizamuddin for their entries. Maybe you'll have a better chance in future months.

And here's an excerpt from the article:

Query Result

 In the chart Y axis, I need to show the amount as a currency. So I am adding some styling to the “Y axis” of my chart and to the tooltip (I am writing down the styling code, to make the example complete.).

<UserControl.Resources>

    <Style x:Name="CustomDataPoint" TargetType="toolkit:ColumnDataPoint">

        <Setter Property="DependentValueStringFormat" Value="{}{0:C}"/>

    </Style>

    <Style x:Name="CustomAxisLabel" TargetType="toolkit:AxisLabel">

        <Setter Property="StringFormat" Value="{}{0:C}"/>

    </Style>

</UserControl.Resources>

===================================

Read the rest here:

Connecting to SSAS Cube using Silverlight

Thanks to Jaliya Udagedara for your great contribution to the TechNet Guru contest! You can read about all the July winners here: TechNet Guru Awards - July 2013

Also, for the August Guru competition, see TechNet Guru Contributions - August 2013.

Are you a Wiki Ninja? http://technet.com/wiki

    - Ninja Ed

Hello and welcome everybody to our TNWiki Article Spotlight on Tuesday.

"I've got the power" - A long, long time ago Snap probably had something different in mind, but I think most of you, especially the Business Intelligence people, have heard about Power BI. I have heard this term the first time during a Business Intelligence project when we talk about the power of Excel. With the arrival of Office 365 it was reawaken. Two months ago Kumar Vivek has started Power BI Learning Resources which should help you to get started with Power BI in combination with Office 365. Also the article covers Power Pivot, Data Management and the Power BI App from the Windows Store.

To conclude, if you are interested in Business Intelligence, Excel, or other kind of similar technologies you should have a look at this article and, if you like, add some other resources to it.

- German Ninja Jan (Twitter, Blog, Profile)