All the votes are in! Bit late this months, as some judges were very busy with very important Microsoftness...
Below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, February 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.
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.
We have tried to provide feedback on every article, good and bad comments.
 | BizTalk Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Mohit Gupta | Using Windows Azure BizTalk Services to Insert XML Messages into an Azure SQL Server | Ed Price: "I love the Business Scenario example, and the Step By Step section is very clear with great formatting!" TGN: "very nice article, explains everything easy, good going Mohit!" |
| Sandro Pereira | Migrating BizTalk Server maps to Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) maps | TGN: "AaaaaMAZING article Sandro! My favorite this month!" Ed Price: "This is a great topic! The images help a lot as you explain the steps!" |
| Steef-Jan Wiggers | Windows Azure BizTalk Services Operations: Backup and Restore | Ed Price: "Another great masterpiece! Fantastic explanations through the whole process!" TGN: "This is valuable for people to know, it's so easy! Thanks Steef-Jan!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Windows Azure BizTalk Services: Upgrade to February 2014 SDK by Lex Hegt
TGN: "Very good one Lex, nice to have this info out there for people that are not sure! Can save them for a lot of time"
Ed Price: "A very useful and valuable guide if you're upgrading! Great article!" - Using Windows Azure Biztalk Service to receive EDI file from multiple partner and convert to XML by Mohit Gupta
TGN: "Very good article Mohit! Good photos to explain your code, and how you do thing!"
Ed Price: "The instructions and images do a wonderful job taking you through this scenario! It's good to see Mohit include the full source code!" - BizTalk Server : How Map Works on Port Level by Maheshkumar S Tiwari
Ed Price: "Although the article could use some tweaking in grammar, the visuals and formatting do a fantastic job at how mapping works!"
TGN: "Great explaination! Worth an extra vote!" - A Multi-Type Flat File Assembler for Multi-Part Messages by Peter Lindgren
Ed Price: "Great formatting and valuable code snippets! It would benefit from a little more spacing at the top (between paragraphs and above the TOC), but it's a quick fix! Good article!" - How to integrate Two way WCF Service with Windows Azure Biztalk Services by Mohit Gupta
Ed Price: "Wow, another great article from Mohit! The visuals and the Architecture diagram make this article shine! It's amazing to have so many good articles this month!"
| Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Eihab Isaac | FIM 2010 R2 & BHold: How to create and use Supervisor Role | PG: "Nice article, interesting content, good topic, BHOLD articles are rare, so keep going!" Ed Price: "The section divisions with clear explanations, steps, and images really help break this out and make it a great article! Important topic!" |
| Majd Andoni | Handling a composite type request for multivalued attributes | PG: "Nice article, interesting content, good balance between text and images." Ed Price: "Another valuable article with well-formatted code and a wonderful diagram at the bottom! Could benefit from a TOC." |
| James Resue | Demystify Kerberos setup with FIM 2010 R2 with SSPR | PG: "Nice article, well done. " Ed Price: "The Case and Scenario sections are very helpful!" |
| SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Nitin Gupta | Custom BCS connector for Search with Security Trimming, Batching and Incremental Crawling | TVG: "BCS is one of my most favorite Service Applications and not easy to learn due to complexity, well done!" Ed Price: "Not only is it incredibly thorough, but the comments really explain its value... Matthew Yarlett: "Fantastic article! Detailed, very interesting, and a great topic to have a thorough walk-through on!" Dan: "An excellent article, Nitin!! I love how you have written such a detailed article which motivates other SharePoint admins to adopt Visual Studio." Prateek: "Thanks alot Nitin and Vaibhav. I was stuck for about a week; this article helped me rectify my issues. Thanks a ton. :)"" GO: "Great article! Detailed and interesting." |
| Steven Andrews | How to update parent folders when child contents are modified | Ed Price: "Thorough descriptions and steps! I left a comment about one way to get the images to not show up as numbered steps. Great article!" GO: "This is a "nice to know" article! The idea that each Document Set shares the DocSetName column value with any document contained within it could be very useful. " |
| Dan Christian | Search Service Application Issue with AAM | Ed Price: "Another fantastic article from Dan with thorough explanations and clarifying screenshots!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- SharePoint URL Rewrite by Dan Christian
GO: "I'm a huge fan of the articles written by Dan! There is always a TOC and a conclusion. Well Done!"
Ed Price: "Very thorough, with explanations, steps, and images!" - How to find custom columns that are used in lists within a site programmatically by Ramakrishnaraja
GO: "I recommend Powershell but however, Visual Studio should also work."
TVG: "Helpful but I would recommend PowerShell"
Ed Price: "Good topic and code formatting. Short and sweet!" - PowerShell 3.0 issue with SharePoint 2010 by Mohammad Nizamuddin
Ed Price: "Very clear solution. Good article." - Device Channels in SharePoint 2013 by Geetanjali Arora
Unattributed comments were: "This article should benefit heavy credentials from MSDN/TechNet"
TVG: "Good overview, but please add references to the official MSDN articles"
Ed Price: "Great descriptions! Could benefit from a TOC, References, and a formatted code snippet. Good job!"
| Small Basic Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Nonki Takahashi | How to Install Small Basic onto Windows 8.1 | Ed Price: "Wow, this is incredibly valuable. Thank you for getting us all these steps! The images also help a lot!" |
| Nonki Takahashi | Small Basic: Color | Ed Price: "This is a fine addition to the Small Basic library! A great deep dive on colors! " |
| Joe Dwyer (DwyerTech) | Olympics - Small Basic Style! | Ed Price: "This is a great sample and fun game! Thanks, Joe!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Small Basic Known Issue: 23257 - GraphicsWindow.GetPixel() Returns Alpha Blending Color in Remote by Nonki Takahashi
Ed Price: "Another good solution to a known problem! Very helpful!"
| SQL BI and Power BI Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| HimanshuSharma | Geocoding | Ed Price: "Great message from Paul in the comments: "This is a great post, Himanshu, and will be quite valuable for someone needing to geocode locations. It would also be great to see an example with the Bing Maps API. Thanks for the contribution."" NN: "Interesting article, but unfortunately at present has a problem with all codes that make it hard to read" |
| Tim Pacl | The Devil is in the Details | NN: "Nice article" Ed Price: "I didn't see much of a devil, but there are a lot of details about the Details group! Great article! From Saeid in the comments: "Another great article by Tim!"" |
| SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Durval Ramos | Ghost "Rows" Buster in SQL Server | DRC: "The article is very good and it clearly explained about how the ghost clean up works and also clears with a good example on how to manually track the ghost records in SQL database. Finally it talks about how to over the problem which uses the command DBCC FORCEGHOSTCLEANUP() which is undocumented and should not be tested on the production servers as it causes logical inconsistency in the database. " Ed Price: "Very thorough. Good point from DRC about the undocumented/unsupported command. The comments really show how great this article is... Saeid: "Attractive title! Very informative! I shared it in our FB SQL Group." Plus compliments from Pituach and Shanky! A fantastic article! " NN: "Very interesting article but needs some English grammar editing" |
| Praveen Rayan D'sa | SQL Server: Instant File Initialization Exceptions | NN: "Good article" DRC: "The article is good. MSDN blogs cover 2 scenarios and this blog covered 2 additional scenarios(checkDB, Database snapshot). Caution alignment has to be fixed. sp_readerrorlog command is undocumented and include this in caution section. " Ed Price: "Great article with clear explanations and code formatting! I love the References section!" |
| Jayakumaur (JK) | Effective use of Keyboard Shortcuts with SQL Server Management Studio | DRC: "This is a good article. This links to the MSDN articles which discusses about the other shortcuts which are not discussed here. This also article also shows how to customize the shortcuts as the requirement. " Ed Price: "Incredibly thorough! I love the "Other Keyboard Shortcuts" section!" NN: "Very helpful tricks to improve working with SSMS" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Automate Database Migration between SQL Server Instances by Ahmad Osama
DRC: "While testing the powershell script, I am getting this error. I am able to load other modules which are already present (Import-Module vpnclient) so looks like there are some issues with this module which needs to rectified. PS C:\windows\system32> Import-Module DB-Migrate Import-Module : The specified module 'DB-Migrate' was not loaded because no valid module file was found in any module directory. At line:1 char:1 + Import-Module DB-Migrate + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : ResourceUnavailable: (DB-Migrate:String) [Import-Module], FileNotFoundException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Modules_ModuleNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.ImportModuleCommand. If we don’t have access to the defined location, then we should have some steps to load the modules from different locations. PowerShell is a powerful tool to make things easier. Great attempt in accomplishing the day to day tasks through PowerShell. "
Ed Price: "Good interactions in the comments. Check out DRC's found issues. Good job on the text formatting!"
NN: "Good article - I think all 4 articles are of good quality and I can not chose between them"
| System Center Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Mr X | How to manage Pending Reboots of your AD-Integrated servers using Orchestrator | Ed Price: "A fantastic use of Orchestrator!" |
| ChristophMaresch | SCOM 2012 VSAE – Extend Microsoft.Windows.Computer Class with Powershell and Active Directory | Ed Price: "Great PowerShell script!" |
| Mr X | How to suppress the system restart on devices in a Software Updates Automatic Deployment Rule | Ed Price: "Short but sweet! A very good explanation from Mr X!" |
| Transact-SQL Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Jayakumaur (JK) | T-SQL : Performing row wise string operations in SQL Server | Samuel Lester: "Great write-up on a common forum topic, nicely presented code, well formatted, and very helpful!" Richard Mueller: "Good explanation of the code. Perhaps we need line numbers in this case, or the explanations should be comments in the code. Should references to "holiday" be "vacation"?" Ed Price: "Although first created in January, this article wasn't written until February. Fantastic formatting, descriptions, images, and even helpful in-code comments are what makes this article shine!" |
| Himanshu Sharma | T-SQL - Understanding Triggers | Richard Mueller: "Great introduction and explanations. The See Also section should link to Wiki Articles." Ed Price: "Great article content, but the text is in boxes and includes various formatting issues. Good topic!" Samuel Lester: "Thanks for the contribution!" |
| M. Mahfoud EL HOUDAIGUI | T-SQL : create and test an alert | Samuel Lester: "The code for all three of the alert entries is handy, but is sorely lacking explanation, descriptions, etc. The articles have great potential to be extremely helpful with some supporting text." Richard Mueller: "This article needs explanations and discussion. This article could have links to the others on the same subject." Ed Price: "Good topic, but it needs text to explain each part." |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- T-SQL: the primordial Alerts (Best Practices) by M. Mahfoud EL HOUDAIGUI
Richard Mueller: "Lots of code examples. Could use explanations. Needs links and a See Also section." - T-SQL : enable/disable an alert by M. Mahfoud EL HOUDAIGUI
Richard Mueller: "Needs links to other articles. Should have an introduction and explanation of the purpose."
Ed Price: "Again, explanations are needed. This is a great topic choice."
| Visual C# Technical Guru - February 2014 | ||
| Jaliya Udagedara | Lock Statement in C# | Ed Price: "Good explanations and great code formatting. It could benefit from a TOC." NN: "Ok article" |
| Shweta Lodha | Overload Resolution Revisited | NN: "Interesting article - too much copied materia" Ed Price: "Good code solution and comment interactions!" |
| João Sousa | ASP.NET MVC 5 - Routing | Ed Price: "I believe this is C# code, so it fits in this category. Great job putting this all together!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Analogy on BackgroundWorker thread in C# by Shweta Lodha
Ed Price: "No red flags, but it could use a grammar pass and more clarity. Great job on the section formatting!" - How to Publish ASP.NET MVC Web Application to Windows Azure by João Sousa
Ed Price:"We don't have an ASP category yet. Should we start one?" - Windows Azure Getting Started - Basic Operations on Blob Storage by João Sousa
JM: "code samples are helpful, topic is clear and concise"
Ed Price: "Great article. Should this should have gone in the Windows Server category? Not sure if we need a new category for Windows Azure. " - Avoiding deadlock in async/await by Tonchi91
NN: "The article is not very clear. What deadlock we're talking about here?"
Ed Price: "Some good concerns from NN and those below. I'd love to see these issues addressed. Great topic with good write up and references!"
Unattributed comments were: "This does not correctly explain how to use async/await. "return await" is redundant and there is no explanation of how the deadlock was created (ConfigureAwait(false) is not a magical deadlock fixing switch)." - Quick note on Microsoft.Net Thread.Start, Delegate.BeginInvoke, Control.BeginInvoke by Mohammad Nizamuddin
JM: "Information is correct, but needs code samples"
Unattributed comments were: "Content seems to have come from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2772597/difference-between-delegate-begininvoke-and-thread-start "
| Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Carsten Siemens | Windows Azure Portal | BL: "A very substancial collection of resources, well organized. Also a very pleasing graphic design that could inspire other portals.. " PG: "Nice article, with a massive load of information, good start as portal!" NN: "Very good consolidation of Windows Azure articles. Needs some formatting and grammar corrections" Richard Mueller: "A good collection of links. Because this includes external links, this should be called a Survival Guide." |
| Matthew Yarlett | Wiki: Format XML Markup using Notepad++ | Richard Mueller: "Definitely helpful information to fix a stuborn problem." BL: "Very structured, detailed and well illustrated answer to a real challenge. This reads like the script for a great how-to video and would be great to see that one day." PG: "Nice article, well done!" NN: "Good article" |
| Durval Ramos | Article Spotlight | Richard Mueller: "A fantastic idea to highlight these articles." BL: "Major credit for an article that shows long term commitment to tracking to an area that really matters to the authors of the represented article. Looking forward to see the impact over time." PG: "Nice collection of articles!" NN: "Not clear why the Credits section gives credit to the author of the article and also relevance of articles in the See Also section to that particular article" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Yammer Portal by Benoit Jester - MTFC
NN: "Nice initiative, but most articles are just stubs. Need more information about technology"
Richard Mueller: "A good start."
BL: "This is a great idea that I can see really taking off as it gets more fleshed out."
PG: "Needs bit more work and update" - The CodePlex Corner by Steven Andrews
BL: "I can see this article becoming a great resource to bring the TN Wiki and Codeplex closer together, by allowing the community to discover and leverage the great work that has already been done. Something we want to watch grow over time."
PG: "Nice start, needs a bit more work. Are you focussing on Sharepoint only, or are you collecting other technologies too? "
| Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Mcosmin | A Collection of Useful MVVM Tricks | Ed Price: "Great descriptions with code snippets broken out, formatted, and explained well. Great job!" Peter Laker: "A nice collection of tips here, thanks mcosmin!" |
| Isham Mohamed | C# helper class for parse Foursquare venue API in Windows Phone | Ed Price: "This a good topic with some good code comments, but it could benefit from formatted text and code, a TOC, and having the code broken up more with more thorough explanations." Peter Laker: "Excellent code dump, useful topic!" |
| Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| Magnus (MM8) | Using the Event Aggregator Pattern to Communicate Between View Models | Ed Price: "Great explanations, images, and formatted code will take you through this fun journey! " Peter Laker: "Sensational contribution as always from Magnus!" |
| dev hedgehog | Trick To Use A ResourceDictionary Only When In Design Mode | Ed Price: "Fantastic trick with some well-formatted code snippets. Great article!" Peter Laker: "Very nice tip dev hedgehog, thank you!!" |
| Windows Server Technical Guru - February 2014 |
| NeoHypocrite | Configuring a two node Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster on Hyper V using iSCSI | Ed Price: "Very thorough with images for each step!" GL: "Good screenshots. I would like to see more of explanations of the parameters that are chosen." JM: "An excellent article that many Admins will find very helpful, great work!" |
| Mr X | How to manage your AD-integrated servers Life Cycle in virtualized environments by using Powershell | Ed Price: "A great diagram, images, and code formatting really bring this article to life" GL: "Good information. I would like to know what determines that a VM is reaching end of life cycle. In addition, how do you replace the role that the VM is serving?" JM: "Another excellent article, nice work." |
| Mr X | How to use Powershell to notify Active Directory users about password expiry | JM: "This is an excellent article, thanks for all of your contributions." Ed Price: "Great descriptions at the top!" GL: "The script could have more comments. The "How is the script working" section could be added directly to the script." |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Active Directory: Attributes in the Partial Attribute Set by Richard Mueller
GL: "This is very good information. I would like to see a scenario where I might need to make changes to the PAS. Why is it important to know members of the PAS?"
Ed Price: "Great explanations and "Other Resources" section!"
JM: "This is a very good article, thanks for your contribution." - How to force an immediate refresh of Group Policy settings on domain-joined computers by Mr X
JM: "Very good, to-the-point article that a lot of folks will find useful. Nice work!"
GL: "Good information. I would add a note that says computers which are offline will not be affected and will receive Group Policy when they boot."
PB:"This is nice!"
Ed Price: "Great topic!" - Windows Server - Terminal Services - Set Default Printer with a local Script by Yagmoth555
Ed Price: "Good topic that's well executed!"
GL: "The script would be better if comments were included to describe what is happening. I recommend putting the instructions here."
PB:"A great start, great subject"
JM: "This is a good article, but it needs revision for clarity." - Troubleshooting - WMI quota voilation causing slow logon on domain controllers by Himanshu.rana
JM: "This is a very good, detailed troubleshooting article. nice work!"
Ed Price: "Could benefit from a TOC and a grammar/spelling pass. "
Unattributed comments were: "There are many spelling errors and grammar issues." - Windows Server: Top Spooler Issues by Yagmoth555
Ed Price: "Could benefit from a grammar/typo pass. Great topic with good explanations. Short but sweet. Great article!"
JM: "This is a great article that will help print Admins."
Unattributed comments were: "There are quite a few typos and spelling errors. I don't think adding a 32 bit driver is considered a spooler issue so the title should be adjusted."A huge thank you to EVERYONE who contributed an article to February's competition.
Hopefully we will see you ALL again in March 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:
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