The Microsoft TechNet Guru Awards! (March 2014)
All the votes are [finally] in!
And at last, below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, March 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.
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.
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BizTalk Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Tomasso Groenendijk | Using BAM in the ESB Toolkit | Ed Price: "Incredibly valuable and very well written! Great article!" Mandi Ohlinger: "A custom BAM dashboard - LOVE it! Another great ESB addition to the Wiki." TGN: "Nice one, I really liked this one, explains how to use the ESB together with BAM, great work and well explained!" |
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Steef-Jan Wiggers | Windows Azure BizTalk Services: Pulling Messages from a Service Bus Queue | Ed Price: "This is amazingly well written with beautiful images and formatting. Great job!" TGN: "Azure, Azure, Azure! Nice one Steef-Jan, people are waiting on articles like this. Good job, and thanks for the contribution!" Mandi Ohlinger: "A very informative How To. Screen shots are very helpful." |
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boatseller | Detecting a Missing Message | Mandi Ohlinger: "GREAT addition to the Wiki and to any user who suspects missing messages. The BizTalk support team can use this orchestration. " Ed Price: "I love the visuals on the orchestration implementation! Important topic!" TGN: "Nice article, great to see a solution to detect missing files." |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- How and in what cases Property demotion works in BizTalk by Ravindar Thati
TGN: "Actually, this is a very nice topic, and I'm a bit amazed that this article just found it's way to the Wiki, great work Ravindar!"
Ed Price: "Very thorough and well explained!!" - BizTalk Adapter Service Installation (February 2014 Update) by Colin Meade
TGN: "I love to see "how-to" articles explaind with a lot of pictures, very good Colin!"
Ed Price: "The images help tell the story. Great job!" - Biztalk: Create Repeating Records From Comma-Separated Values by Peter Lindgren
Mandi Ohlinger: "Recursive XSLT - Not something I expected to read today. Thank you for including the messages and templates!"
TGN: "Nice article, will be helpful for beginners! =) Thanks for adding this Peter!"
Ed Price: "Great explanations and formatting on the code snippets!"
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Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Eihab Isaac | FIM 2010 R2 BHOLD: Non-BHOLD Approval Process | Ed Price: "Very thorough explanations! Great formatting and colors on the tables and code snippets! And the images are also helpful!" PG: "Nice article, we need more of these." |
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Micah Rowland | FIM:How To Use PowerShell to View a Metaverse Object's Connector's Attribututes Side By Side | PG: "Nice article, nice format. well written" Ed Price: "Good code snippet and use of code comments. Could use more explanations and maybe breaking the code into sections with more information about each section. Good job!" |
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Giriraj Singh | FIM:Delete Bulk Expected Rule Entries Using FIM OTB features | Ed Price: "Good procedural steps! It could benefit from more explanations, a grammar pass, and some images. Good article!" PG: "Short but nice article." |
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SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Matthew Yarlett | SharePoint: Use PowerShell to find Fields using a Managed Metadata TermSet | Jinchun Chen: "Good article." Ed Price: "Although this is Matt's shorter article this month, this is an incredibly important topic, and the code is perfect! As Dan says in the comments: "Matthew Yarlett has done it again!! IMHO when it comes to SharePoint powershell you are second to none." This is a great article!" |
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Rahul A Shinde | SharePoint 2013: Deploy and apply theme to SharePoint sites with PowerShell | Ed Price: "Fantastic explanations and use of images!" |
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Matthew Yarlett | SharePoint: Testing Email Alerts in UAT and DEV Environments | Jinchun Chen: "Nice! It can be used for troubleshooting SharePoint Incoming/Outgoing related issues too." Ed Price: "Wow! This article is astonishingly thorough!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- SharePoint 2010: Configure Navigation Settings in a Sandbox Solution by Geetanjali Arora
Ed Price: "Great article with good explanations, images, code formatting, and a very thorough References section! Great job!" - SharePoint Online: Add Advanced Search Web Part by Michaelle de las Alas
Ed Price: "This is a common scenario! Good article! " - SharePoint Online: Create Search Managed Property by Michaelle de las Alas
Ed Price: "Another great topic! " - SharePoint Online: Use a Search Managed Property on Property Restrictions of Advanced Search Web Part by Michaelle de las Alas
Ed Price: "Michaelle does a great job of including images that clarify the steps. "
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Small Basic Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Nonki Takahashi | Small Basic: Centering Text in Graphics Window | RZ: "Clearly written explanation with nice graphics to go with it." Ed Price: "I love having the three options like this! And the images really bring it to life! The links to the shared programs (with their source code) really help if you want to dig deeper and learn more!" |
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Nonki Takahashi | Small Basic Known Issue: 23589 - Controls.GetTextBoxText() Returns CR+LF as Newline from Multi-Line Text Box in Local but CR in Remote | RZ: "Bugs are always hard to track down, especially the unknown unknowns :( Good job on hunting it down!" Ed Price: "This acts as a valuable KB article! Great addition to the troubleshooting library!" |
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Nonki Takahashi | Small Basic: Expression | RZ: "Good introduction to expressions" Ed Price: "Short and sweet intro to Expressions. Thanks, Nonki!" |
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SQL BI and Power BI Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Michael Amadi | A Practical Example of How to Apply Power Query Data Transformations on Structured and Unstructured Datasets | NN: "This is a terrific tutorial on Power Pivot with very helpful images. Great article" Ed Price: "This is a fantastic combination of Power Query and Power Pivot... a valuable contribution!" |
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SQL Server General and Database Engine Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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chandra sekhar pathivada | managing database backups across all the instances without maintenance plan | Samuel Lester: "Chandra, outstanding contribution and information! Your SSIS package handles many of the shortcomings of Maintenance Plans. MPs were originally created to assist DBAs with the more common administrative tasks, but as the scale continues to grow across enterprise environments, we're all forced to write our own enhanced versions such as this. Thanks for the addition and please do add to the Gallery if you haven't yet." Jinchun Chen: "Nice. It is suggested to add error outputs in the package to handler unexpected errors." NN: "Good article. The SSIS solution can use a bit more explanation. Also See Also section is missing" DRC: "This is good article, The only this which can be corrected is : ==> This can be achieved using “maintenance Cleanup Task • Maintenance Plan has a control flow item “maintenance Cleanup Task” to delete the old backup files based on age of the backup, but it creates the problem when it deletes the full database backups based on n no.of days leaving all the dependent intermediate differential and transaction logs which are useless. " |
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Shanky | Understanding Logging in Tempdb.Is Tempdb re-created or rebuilt after SQL Server restart | NN: "Very good article with an interesting analysis" DRC: "This article is good and provides lots of detailed information along with sample query and screenshot. The screenshot of few need few more details (files of model are missing) This article can be broken down into 2 1) understanding tempdb recreation 2) Logging in Tempdb 1) understanding tempdb recreation:- This is not concluded properly. The article doesnt talk about the physical files which are recreated even if we delete the tempdb files " Samuel Lester: "Shanky, very nice article on the internals of TempDB! It was tough judging this month as both articles were very informative contributions!" |
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System Center Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Mr X | How to manage VM pinning within a Hyper-V cluster by combining the use of System Center VMM and Orchestrator | Ed Price: "Mr. X, this is another incredibly thorough article! Fantastic job!" |
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Idan Vexler | Create Custom XML For OSD In SCCM | Ed Price: "Love the list of requirements! Very thorough in dividing each step!" |
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Omar Lopez (loplim) | SCOM 2012 - Create Alert / Monitor Based on Windows event ( Administrator login alert ) | Ed Price: "Good use of images. Could use a TOC with sections and more descriptions. Good job!" |
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Transact-SQL Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Jayakumaur (JK) | Understanding IDENTITY in SQL Server | Ed Price: "Wow, what a competitive month! This article is amazing, with thorough explanations in each section!" Richard Mueller: "A good tutorial on an important feature of T-SQL." |
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Durval Ramos | Paging a Query with SQL Server | Ed Price: "Durval's article is fantastically thorough and easy to follow!" Richard Mueller: "Very useful concept when populating controls from a query, which should improve performance. I like the images. Well done." |
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Naomi N | T-SQL: Split String with a Twist | Richard Mueller: "Very intersting problem with an original solution." Ed Price: "A very powerful and well-articulated solution from Naomi!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Split Date Range into Months by Ronen Ariely
Ed Price: "I love the Introduction and Case Study sections!"
Richard Mueller: "I needed an explanation of the Numbers table and what it is." - Fully automated SQL Server Restore Script by Praveen Rayan D'sa
Ed Price: "Good set up and code, but it would be even better with the code broken up and thoroughly explained. Good article!"
Richard Mueller: "I suspect code is rarely required to restore full backups. Restoring full plus incremental backups (transaction logs) is more of a challenge."
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Visual Basic Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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The Thinker | Exporting and Importing Wireless Settings Using Netsh in VB.NET | SB: "Code could be formatted better, task is something I can see as potentially useful although I would prefer a bit more narrative description and comments in the code explaining why it was done a certain way, although the code is simple enough to work through." MR: "Great tool code!" Ed Price: "This is a good contribution! One way to improve an article like this is to explain the parts of the code more in depth, as a way to introduce each snippet (and maybe dividing a block up more). Then you could link to the Gallery iteam if the reader wants to access the entire snippet at once. The images are also very helpful! Great job!" Richard Mueller: "Perhaps this code should be in the gallery. There should be more explanation in a Wiki." |
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Visual C# Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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João Sousa | ASP.NET WebAPI 2 - Stream Windows Azure blobs | NN: "Very nice tutorial and also can be downloaded from the Gallery" Ed Price: "I love to see this ASP.NET content! Each step is very clear! Great code formatting!" |
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Raghunathan S | C# Code Compilation at Runtime from C# Windows Forms Application | Ed Price: "Good descriptions and code formatting. It could benefit from a TOC. Great article!" NN: "This looks like an interesting article, but too short and the code is hard to read in its present format" |
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Raghunathan S | Creating a Simple logging class with System.Diagnostics namespace in C# | NN: "Good article, but too short" Ed Price: "This is a pretty good article. It could benefit from a TOC and more descriptions around what the code is doing and why. Good job!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Use of “Enumerable.Cast” and “Enumerable.OfType” in C# by Jaliya Udagedara
NN: "Good and clear explanations"
Ed Price: "It could use a lot more information about the context and what the code is doing. Also, the code formatting could be improved. Good topic!" - Dynamic method invocation with Generics by CatfisAndGrits
NN: "Interesting article, I learned something new"
Ed Price: "Good article! It could use more descriptions of what the code is doing, a TOC, and section titles. Great job on formatting the code!"
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Wiki and Portals Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Matthew Yarlett | Wiki: Basic Image Formatting using Pixlr | BL: "This deserves credit as much for the idea as for the actual article - many authors contribute from computers that may not have authoring tools installed and this simple online solution has the potential to iprove quality a lot." Richard Mueller: "Excellent explanation of a useful tool for Wiki authors. A "See Also" section would be useful." PG: "Nice artilce, well done, nice layout. Great!" NN: "Good article" |
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Durval Ramos | VBA & VBS Portal | NN: "Very good new portal about VBA. Introduction may be improved a bit" Richard Mueller: "A great collection of Wiki articles. Excellent use of recommended features in a Wiki article." PG: "Nice article good start!" BL: "Another great initial compilation of relevant resources. Would be very interested in seeing how this develop over time." |
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Mr X | Wiki: System Center Orchestrator Portal | NN: "Good new portal. Missing See Also section with links to other portals" Richard Mueller: "A good collection of articles. This Portal adds a lot to the TechNet Wiki." PG: "Nice and neat article? Suggestion to add more references to related articles and platforms on Wiki." BL: "great initial compilation of SC Orchestrator resources. Hoping this will grow over time as the product has a few other active Wiki contributors." |
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Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Isham Mohamed | Pin Windows Phone 8 app to start screen on first launch. | Peter Laker: "A very useful and informative article! Also, Nice use of fonts and images." Ed Price: "Good explanation, but it could benefit from a TOC and tweaked formatting. Good job!" |
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Ibraheem Osama Mohamed | Coming from an asp.net background, let’s build our first Windows Store Application | Ed Price: "Great job on the formatting, explanations, and code snippets!" Peter Laker: "Excellent primer for those moving from asp.net and all beginners." |
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mcosmin | The Performance Analyzer Paradox | Ed Price: "This is a good philosophical article, but it would be richer with examples and visuals. " Peter Laker: "Nice story, good reading, very worthy entry and gratefully received!" |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Application rating reminder in Windows Phone by Rahber
Peter Laker: "Great tip! This is just the kind of thing we look for!"
Ed Price: "This is a good bit of content, but the font is large, centered, not formatted into sections, and it reads more like a blog post than a Wiki article. Good content though!"
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Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Magnus (MM8) | WPF/MVVM: Handling Changes To Dependency Properties In The View | Ed Price: "Nice, thorough topic with good explanations! Could benefit from code formatting. Great article!" Peter Laker: "A nice primer on a fundamental aspect of xaml. Great layout, images, descriptions, etc." |
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dev hedgehog | Trick To Use StaticResource With Path | Peter Laker: "A very useful and commonly pondered subject. Thanks for a great contribution!" Ed Price: "This is a great solution with good code formatting and code comments!" |
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Windows Server Technical Guru - March 2014 |
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Mr X | How to manage your DC/DNS servers with dynamic IPs in Windows Azure | JM: "This is an excellent article, however you need to change all instances of the term "on-promise" to "on-premise."" JH: "really detailed, very complete with scripts added" Richard Mueller: "This might be the best article I have judged. Code formatting could be improved, but otherwise an outstanding contribution." |
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Mr X | How to assign a private Static IP to a Windows Azure VM | JH: "excellent, concise, good topic" Richard Mueller: "Excellent documentation of the use of very new tools to manage IP addresses." JM: "Another excellent article, thanks much for your contributions!" |
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Mahdi Tehrani | Customize DST time zone configuration across the forest with GPO | JM: "This is an excellent article, however you need to change all instances of the term "Daylight Time Saving" to "Daylight Savings Time."" JH: "good info, great illustrations and writing" Richard Mueller: "Original work for an tricky problem. I think the script should run as a Startup script instead of a Logon script on the clients. A "See Also" section and links would help." |
Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:
- Corrupt er broken performance counters Windows Server by Jesper Arnecke
JH: "well written, concise, clear, will help save users time"
Richard Mueller: "Documents PowerShell fixes for tricky problem."
JM: "A very useful article, thanks for your contribution!" - Frequent account lockout troubleshooting by Manjunath Sullad
JM: "A very good article, however it needs an edit pass for grammar and spelling issues, as these problems make some of the article difficult to understand"
JH: "good, useful tips"
Richard Mueller: "Good links to resources at the end."
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A huge thank you to EVERYONE who contributed an article to March's competition.
Hopefully we will see you ALL again in April 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:
Links to forum posts:
Comments
- Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Wow, what a month! Awesome job everyone! Can't believe I had 3 articles win medals! Feeling very happy! - Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Mr X - 4 articles winning medals in one month! Is that some sort of record?! Fantastic work! - Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Congratulations to all authors, especially to medal winners: JK and Matthew with excellent articles - Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Matthew, congrats on winning 3 medals in one month!
Mr X, congrats on winning 4 medals in 3 different categories in one month! - Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Also, Matthew and Mr. X both picked up a rare two Gold Medals this month! - Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Also, like XAML Guy mentioned, if your articles didn't make the top 3, it just means that it was a competitive month. Thanks go out also to Ravindar, Ronen, Praveen, Jaliya, and all the other authors who also had amazing articles this month! - Anonymous
April 17, 2014
Congratz to the SharePoint lovers.. I didn't vote this month, still can see that Matthew is doing excellent work. AGAIN! congratz buddy - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
congratulations to all the winners.. - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
Congrats to our new Gold Medal winners: Tomasso Groenendijk, Michael Amadi, Chandra Sekhar Pathivada, The Thinker, and João Sousa! Thank you for your great articles!
And congrats to Jayakumaur and Isham on a 2nd Gold Medal, Eihab on a 3rd Gold Medal, Matthew on a 6th and 7th Gold Medal, Nonki and Magnus on a 7th Gold Medal, and Mr X on an 8th and 9th Gold Medal! - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
Congrats to our first-time medal winners: Boatseller, Chandra Sekhar Pathivada, Micah Rowland, Giriraj Singh, Idan Vexler, Loplim, Raghunathan S, Ibraheem Osama Mohamed, and Mahdi Tehrani! - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
See http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/19918.technet-guru-the-most-frequent-award-winners.aspx
For Gold Medal Winners, Mr X is in the lead with 9 and we have 5 people with 7 Gold Medals: Naomi, Jaliya, Matthew, Nonki, and Magnus!
For Total Medals, Mr X is leading with 17 (he competes in 3 categories), Nonki has 16, Matthew and Naomi have 13, and Jaliya has 12!
Congrats to you all! - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
Looking at our list of top winners: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/19918.technet-guru-the-most-frequent-award-winners.aspx
The people we should interview next:
Magnus MM8 (I've got that scheduled for this Monday)
Eihab Isaac
Ike Ugochuku
Dev Hedgehog
Peter_Stapf
Litdev
Gaurav Khanna
.paul.
Rahul Shinde
If you see your name, please reply here and email me: edprice at Microsoft.
Thanks! - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
For that matter, anyone with at least 1 Gold Medal or 2 total medals should email me and get an interview!
Thanks to all our contributors! - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
For that matter, anyone with at least 1 Gold Medal or 2 total medals should email me and get an interview! The squeaky wheel gets fixed! =^)
Thanks to all our contributors! - Anonymous
April 18, 2014
congratulations on contributing great contents! - Anonymous
April 19, 2014
great work all! keep contributing :) - Anonymous
April 21, 2014
congratulations to all the winners..esp my fav SQL Server General and Database Engine & T-SQL winners. - Anonymous
April 21, 2014
Congrats to all winners !!!! - Anonymous
April 22, 2014
Hello Ed,
In my article about Tempdb 'Understanding logging iin tempdb...' .I pointed out that Tempdb owner is SA not DBO .In BOL it is written tempdb owner is DBO , but judges did not mentioned any comment about the same.If I am correct than this is a document bug and needs to be updated.Can you touch base with judges regarding the same.If I am wrong I would remove that part from Article. - Anonymous
April 23, 2014
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
April 28, 2014
Welcome to our Monday interview with a Wiki Ninja !
Today's the interview will be with Tomasso - Anonymous
May 02, 2014
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 02, 2014
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 16, 2014
Thanks Durval .. And Matthew, as far as I know, have seen Sathya get 5 medals in one month :) that may be a record all rite!! :Dhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/samlester/archive/2013/10/21/technet-guru-awards-september-2013.aspx - Anonymous
May 16, 2014
Sorry fr the delayed reply - issue with my account that had been preventing me from signing in till now - has been resolved now.. gr8!! - Anonymous
May 18, 2014
JK, you are right! Sathya creates several articles with excellent quality. He is a great MVP SQL Server , but I believe that situations such as this tend to be increasingly difficult to happen because it has appeared more and more good contributors in the Community TechNet Wiki. - Anonymous
July 19, 2014
thank you - Anonymous
November 05, 2014
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