TechNet Guru Awards - September 2013

All the votes are in!  

 

And below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, September 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.

 

PLEASE ALSO NOTE...

A few entries were missed from the voting, for technical reasons, but they will be carried over to this month (October).   Our apologies to those that were affected.

 

BizTalk Technical Guru - September 2013

	Steef-Jan Wiggers	BizTalk Server 2013: WCF-SQL executing a stored procedure in Windows Azure SQL Database	Tord Glad Nordahl: "As always Steef-Jan cooks up an amazing article, well described and authored. Very good work Steef-Jan!" Ed Price: "Beautiful, clear, and incredibly thorough!"
	Suleiman Shakhtour	BizTalk Server:Receive and Send Excel Files from Existing Templates	Tord Glad Nordahl: "Very good article, well described and full of good quality content and images!"Peter Laker: Superb article. very useful indeed!
	M.R.ASHWINPRABHU	BizTalk: Generating Flat File Schema for File with Tag Identifiers not at the Beginning, Grouping Data by Element and Debatching	Mandi Ohlinger: "Oh. My. Goodness. Thank you for putting this on the Wiki! You've definitely resolved some scenarios." Tord Glad Nordahl: "Again, the top 3 articles this month out-class the others with amazing content, well described and elements that are on huge demand from the community! Thanks!" Ed Price: "You can see how much thought has gone into each of the images to make this incredibly clear. Once again, this was a fantastic month for BizTalk content and the true winners here are all the BizTalk users!"

Congratulations to all three above. It's great to see our very own Ninja Blogger, true guru and BizTalk demi-god Steef-Jan leading the charts this month! Special thanks also to runner up Maheshkumar S Tiwari, better luck next month!

SharePoint 2010 / 2013 Technical Guru - September 2013

	Matthew Yarlett	SharePoint: Using PowerShell to Group Filter and Sort Documents by Metadata	TVG: "The numbers tell the tale! PowerShell is a very powerful tool in your admin toolbox, well done!" Margriet Bruggeman: "A very detailed article!!" Ed Price: "Great topic! It's important that SharePoint admins know how to leverage PowerShell! Great formatting with the images and code snippets, and you give a lot of explanation! The icing is the rich list of resources at the bottom where you can learn more about all the related topics!"
	Rahul Shinde	SharePoint 2013: SharePoint Community Site as Real Time Social Communities or Groups	Ed Price: "This is a very deep look at the topic with multiple perspectives and great formatting. As Naomi wrote in the comments, "Great article, as usual!"" Jinchun Chen: "Excellent. A solution with almost all required informaiton."
	Matthew Yarlett	Search vs. Recursive Looping: Getting a List of Sites (SPWeb's) a User Has Access to in a SharePoint Site Collection	TVG: "Search is indeed the most recommended approach and this approach is even more present in SP2013!" Margriet Bruggeman: "An excellent article. Certainly a must read!" Ed Price: "Good subject with a great approach and thorough explanations! Very thorough!"

Congratulations to Matt for winning gold AND bronze. Special thanks also to nunespascal, Daniel Christian & Nilesh Jain for their superb entries. Please continue to compete, as you only just missed out. The judges decision is final, however we may be changing the rules soon so people only win one (their highest) award, so hopefully we see you in the medals next month!

Small Basic Technical Guru - September 2013

	Timo Sö	SmallBasic | AutoUpdater Snippet	RZ: "Is is a very innovative idea to introduce autoupdater functionality to Small Basic!" Ed Price: "The best reviews are in the comments. From Gungan: "Very nice article! Comprehensive but simple enough for a beginner to follow." And from LitDev: "Well written article and useful - I look forward to the next one..." CS: "A little hard to follow the flow, but I like the idea."
	Nonki Takahashi	Small Basic: Parameter or Return Value Range for Math Function	RZ: "Very useful information for those math functions" Ed Price: "Great resource. Thanks, Nonki!"
	Nonki Takahashi	Small Basic: Supported Languages	RZ: "Useful information" Ed Price: "20 languages is pretty awesome! Most software isn't localized for that many different languages."

Nonki deserves silver and bronze, as there were only three entries last month! Congrats to Timo for heading the medals with a superb winning article! C'mon Small Basic folks, lets see your code!!!

SQL Server Analysis Services, PowerPivot Technical Guru - September 2013

	Olaf Helper	PowerPivot: Query Power Pivot DMV's with VBA	Ed Price: "Important topic, great formatting, and I love having the links in line to the parent topics (like how the Power Pivot link in the first line goes to the Power Pivot wiki topic)." Richard Mueller: "Excellent overview of the subject, with great links."
	MnisharMSDN	Profile MDX & SQL  queries from SSRS	Ed Price: "Great formatting, and very easy to follow! The images help take you through the full story." Richard Mueller: "Could use more cross links."
	ShankarGS	SSAS: Custom MDX Query for Excel Filters	Ed Price: "Great topic with thorough steps to take!" Richard Mueller: "Needs more explanation."

Three entries, three winners! Great stuff too, thank you for these excellent contributions, we all learn from you.

SQL Server Reporting Services, Power View, & SQL Server Integration Services Technical Guru - September 2013

	SathyanarrayananS	SSRS - Multi-valued Parameter as Stored procedure Input	Jinchun Chen: "It can be a workaround for using Multi-Value parameter in subscriptions" Richard Mueller: "Amazing solution. I had to puzzle over this one for some time." Ed Price: "It's a tough race this month, but this article is very detailed and features great interaction in the comments!"
	SathyanarrayananS	SSRS - RDL Compare	Ed Price: "As Saeid wrote in the comments: "WOW! It's a nice solution." Great code formatting and images!" Richard Mueller: "Very interesting with a good example. This could prove useful in many situations."
	SathyanarrayananS	SSRS (Matrix) - How to Repeat Headers on Each Page and Keep Headers Fixed while Scrolling	Peter Laker: "Very nice work" Richard Mueller: "Good instructions with a clear example."

Wow, all three medals for SathyanarrayananS!! Also a special thanks to Yogish Bhat for his noble contribution. That's just the result from the voting tool, the way it currently works. Please keep contributing, as you may get more chances in future votes.

Transact-SQL Technical Guru - September 2013

	Saeid Hasani	Structured Error Handling mechanism in SQL SERVER 2012	Richard Mueller: "Useful tutorial with lots of examples and very good links. Excellent comparison of THROW and RAISERROR." Jinchun Chen: "Nice article. Thank you for the sharing." Ed Price: "Incredibly well formatted with images, code, and explanations. And great interactions in the comments, making the improvements suggested by Naomi. " DB: "Useful, clear and accurate guidance on error handling" Samuel Lester: "Great coverage of different techniques, challenges, pros/cons. Well done, very informative, and easy to read."
	Stefan Hoffmann	SQL Server XML: Sorting Data in XML Fragments	Samuel Lester: "Interesting problem space and outstanding write-up/solution!" Richard Mueller: "I especially liked the use of FLWOR. Great links." Jinchun Chen: "Good." Ed Price: "Naomi described it well in the comments: "Great article - very interesting!" The formatting on the comments and sections is really well done!"
	Ronen Ariely	T-SQL: Using Bulk Insert to import inconsistent data format (using pure T-SQL)	DB: "Good, detailed on advanced XML Format Files" Richard Mueller: "Very interesting with some good tips. I liked the detailed steps. Good links at end. Grammar and spelling need work." Ed Price: "A lot of great detail!"

Some outstanding pieces above, really worth a read. Thank you all so very much for your time and generosity in sharing these with the SQL community. Also a big thanks to SathyanarrayananS & DIEGOCTN who JUST missed out in the month's votes. It was very close as we had some supurb work from everyone in the SQL category in September.

Visual Basic Technical Guru - September 2013

	John Anthony Oliver	Code for 2008 and 2010 versions of vb.net. Have you ever wanted an oval, triangle, a pentagon, a hexagon or an octagon for a control or a form?	Richard Mueller: "A very interesting and creative article with lots of example code." MR: "Helpful article! " Ed Price: "Good solution with a lot of detail! Would be even better formatted into sections, since it's so long. Some good interactions in the comments, too!" SB: "The article has a narrative and shows doing something which I know people want to achieve. The code shows revisions and is VB code. "
	.paul.	Maths Revision V1.0	Richard Mueller: "An interesting assortment of programs. I like the icons for each." MR: "Great app, but not an article that describes a way for users to learn." Ed Price: "Nice collection! A few of these as a tutorial would be great. " SB: "No real narrative but lots of code samples which are well done. Code contains comments but would like to more narrative on articles. " Anthony D. Green: "This is not an article so much as a download link that showcases code the author has written in the past. The code seems like it might be fun and educational but the author needs to bring more content into the article to prime the reader before asking them to download arbitrary code on to their machines and run it."
	.paul.	VerticalLabel Control	Anthony D. Green: "Given the emergence of UI frameworks like WPF this topic seems less compelling - it would be interested in to see an article showcases how a layout transform makes this very easy." Ed Price: "Would be good as a tutorial. " SB: "The control is simple a small code sample, useful although the narrative seems to indicate that this is just a C# run through translator and fixed up - so feels as though its useful but the VB is an afterthought. The fact its targeting VS2008 is also something I'd like it targeting current VS version " Richard Mueller: "It would help to see the code with an explanation." MR: "This is not a good "article" example of how to do something."

Only two entrants with three entries in total for September :(

Still, what pure gold we got! Thanks to both John and Paul. Lovin' your work guys!!

Visual C# Technical Guru - September 2013

	Jaliya Udagedara	IEnumerable<T> Vs. IQueryable<T>	Ed Price: "As Naomi wrote in the comments, "I like your articles and your style - easy to follow." I agree, it has great formatting, and it is very clear. Special thanks to Pituach for helping format it and for giving Jaliya some good advice!" CW: "The most important difference is in the query building. Unfortunatly this was at the end. Article still quite useful."
	chilberto	WCF Service Hosting - Supporting Multiple Versions	Ed Price: "Great topic with good formatting on the code snippets!" Peter Laker: "Great layout, love the code bits! We want more!"
	PaulDAndrea	How do you manage unmanaged buffers used for P/Invoke	Christian Lukito: "Good wrapper" Ed Price: "Great code formatting! It would be great broken down into sections with more explanations."

Three entrants for September, with six articles between them, and all three get a mention in the medals, which is nice to see.

Great work folks, thanks for your continued contributions, you deserve all the love we bestow upon you over the coming months :D

Windows Phone Technical Guru - September 2013

	mcosmin	How to play flac files in windows phone using C#	JS "Long but good" Ed Price: "Long article; very in depth!"Peter Laker: "Wow yummy, very nice, thanks mcosmin"
	Gaurav Khanna	Searching in Windows Phone ListBox	JS: "Nice little tutorial" Ed Price: "This is a great topic!"Peter Laker: "A very useful article!"
	Tiziano Cacioppolini	IsolatedStorage: folders and files	JS: "Basic info all in one place" Ed Price: "Good topic, but it could use more explanations."Peter Laker: "A great resource, will help future generations, could do with filling out with a little more info"

Three entries, three new gurus. All entries were well worth the read, we are very lucky to have your wisdom bestowed upon us. Please keep up the great work, as you've certainly got our attention!

Windows Store Apps Technical Guru - September 2013

	Thomas Claudius Huber	What's new for the Appbar in Windows 8.1	RC: "It's pretty much a rehash of the documentation here. The comments on differences between the XAML implementation and the C# implementation are useful. How about C++ and VB syntax as well? The title and tags should also clarify that this is a XAML-specific article." Ed Price: "Good breakdown of the sections, great formatting of the code and images. Great article! As RC mentioned, this should include more info about XAML. "
	JORDAN RTG	Windows Store Apps Issue with ComboBox Leads to Crash in ATOM Processor	RC: "This is an interesting anecdote, but it's not useful technically without a link to the KB for the hotfix" Ed Price: "Good topic, but it needs to include the solution as well."

Thomas and Jordan are our honourable winners for September.

We may be setting a quality/content bar for medals very soon. Congratulations to all the winners!

WPF Technical Guru - September 2013

	Magnus (MM8)	WPF: Exporting Data from a DataGrid Control	Ed Price: "Fantastic formatting and great descriptions!" Peter Laker: "Wow, awesomely detailed, nice work Magnus!"
	Gaurav Khanna	Multiple Columns in WPF ListBox	Ed Price: "Good breakdown of the sections!" Peter Laker: "Great article Gaurav! Excellent introduction, keep up the great work!"

Amazing contributions from two regular gurus, thanks to both of you for keeping this category going.

Hang in there till the rest of the community catches up!

Personally, I missed the deadline, so couldn't contribute for September D:

Forefront Identity Manager Technical Guru - September 2013

	Peter_Stapf	FIM 2010 R2: How-to Manage Group Membership from the User UI	Ed Price: "This is a high quality article with a TOC, clear headers, great images, and code that is formatted well with great in-line comments that make each line very clear! Fantastic job!" Richard Mueller: "Very useful and well documented solution. I like the use of PowerShell."
	Jacques Swanepoel	FIM 2010 R2 How-to: Password Synchronization with PCNS using a one way external/forest trust with Selective Authentication	Ed Price: "I love the diagram, the "What you will need" section, and the in-depth how-to steps and explanations! It could benefit from better formatting with a TOC and clearer headers. As Peter mentioned in the comments, "Very cool and helpful article, could be useful in my future work." Great article!" Richard Mueller: "Good tutorial with detailed steps."
	Ike Ugochuku - MSFT (IdM-FIM Consultant)	FIM 2010 R2: Using FIM to Synchronize User Data with HP Service Manager 9 (SM9)	Ed Price: "Great start! Looking forward to seeing how this develops" Peter Geelen: "Can you elaborate the article more in detail?"

Some great contributions here, thank you to all three of you. FIM looks like it will grow into a very interesting category. 

SQL Server Database Engine Technical Guru - September 2013

	Shanky	Understanding Lock Escalation	DRC: "I was able to repro the lock escalation even at 5000 rows The reasons and threshold for Lock Escalation are documented hereJinchun Chen: "Nice article." Samuel Lester: "Great investigation and summary of a complex topic broken down in a practical way. I really like the way you explained your test scenarios, the results, and future research that you'd continue to do. A great concept and use for TechNet Wiki!" Ed Price: "Great explanation! Thanks, Shanky!"
	SathyanarrayananS	SQL Server Performance tuning with Indexing	Ed Price: "This is a great Q&A and resource list! An innovative use of TechNet Wiki that is very helpful for people searching on this topic! As DRC mentions, it would be even better to include the query info in the article. Great job!" Samuel Lester: "Outstanding collection of resources, links, and explanations! I can easily see this as a section to a future database engine reference guide. " DRC: "The topic covered is very broad.  It would have been more appropriate to test the queries (along with the expected output) and mention it in the article instead of pointing to 3rd party sites. It clearly summarises the topic and provides links for the related topics.  "

Only the two entries for this category, but both deserved winners, thanks to both of you for entering articles in this category and looking forward to seeing if anyone else has anything to offer in the coming months.

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:

• TechNet Guru Competitions
• TechNet Guru Contributions for October 2013

 

 

Forum announcement links coming soon!

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Congratulations to all of the winners. There were some great entries this month.

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Indeed some truly amazing contributions from some very dedicated community members. Please note, if you win awards and submit awesomeness, you may find us trying to contact you for interviews, and more, so please subscribe to email alerts for comments, and look out for our messages!

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Congratulations everybody! This was a great month with 56 contributions! Peter, I don't think it's super obvious that we had SO MANY contributions! Maybe we can include that info at the top, along with the technologies with the most contributions?

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Most contributions per technology for September...

• BizTalk: 8 Contributions!
• T-SQL: 8 Contributions!
• Visual C#: 6 Contributions!
• SharePOint: 6 Contributions!

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Congratulations to all winners!

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Ed, I like this idea - or a separate article as you did previous month

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Congrats to all winners !!! Its time to show off again in October -  social.technet.microsoft.com/.../20025.technet-guru-contributions-for-october-2013.aspx  :^) !!!

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Also, I think we need to mention whose entries were missed in the voting process (by some technical problems) and therefore don't mention these people under each categories if their articles didn't compete.

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Congratulations to all the winners!

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Naomi, good point. Looks like it was just two articles that didn't make it due to technical reasons. We thought it was three or so at first. So those two articles are being carried over into October... SharePoint 2013: A no Code Solution to Build a Change Management Request by Dan Christian * T-SQL Useful Links by Naomi N *

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2013
  Shashank, how active is the forum? We're not getting enough traffic from the SQL Server DBE topic. So I'm wondering if we can categorize DBE with something else. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  14 new medal winners this month! Congrats and Welcome to Suleiman Shakhtour, M.R.Ashwinprabhu, Timo So, Olaf Helper, MnisharMSDN, ShankarGS, Stefan Hoffmann, John Anthony Oliver, PaulDAndrea, Mcosmin, Thomas Claudius Huber, Jordan RTG, Peter_Stapf, and Jacques Swanepoel!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congratulations everyone!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congrats Suleiman, Ashwin and all !!!!!!!!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congratulation to everyone. I am so happy that I won. Now I will will start to update my article.

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congratulations to all winners! Many thanks to Naomi for your great suggestions!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  You're welcome, Saeid. I made a bit more editing of your article last night. I like it although I was betting on Stefan :)

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congrats to all winners. It is really a good feeling to win. I am really motivated to write more articles. Thank you

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congratulations Matthew and Rahul for winning the SharePoint 2010/2013 award. Congratulations to every one else!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Hello Ed, I can write many articles for database engine ,but would like to only put one in DBE section which I feel was different according to me and would create some thinking . Reason most people do not post article in DBE section(this is my perception) because already Blogs.msdn and net is filled with huge no of DB articles. Nevertheless i would keep posting good articles

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congratulation to all, I have gone through the winning articles and  it is indeed a great collection. Thank for this great Initiative. Does anybody know how to use Windows live writer with Technet? it is really painful to upload images via web interface.

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Congratutations to all !

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Thank you and congratulation to all winners. After my article "Maps and Clusters", I tried to write a simple "copy & code" post. But you are right, it needs more explanation.

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Suleiman Shakhtour, That's great! Go write 10 more articles as amazing at that one! =^) Seriously, thank you for your contribution!

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2013
  Thomas Claudius Huber , That's fantastic! I can't wait to read your October article!

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2013
  Some truly sensational entries for September. It's great to see so many developers active in this community. We are definitely learning who are the true players in this Microsoft development community.

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2013
  Thanks to all the judges for taking the time to read and comment on our articles. Your comments and compliments are always nice to receive!

• Anonymous
  October 20, 2013
  Excellent work! Congratulations everybody!

• Anonymous
  October 23, 2013
  Great work guys and Congrats to all the Winners.. Keep Going.

• Anonymous
  April 25, 2014
  congrations

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2015
  Let's dig into another session from last week's TechNet Wiki International Summit 2015!

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2016
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