April 2017 – TechNet Guru Winners!

All the votes are in!

And below are the results for the TechNet Guru Awards, April 2017 !!!!

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.

	HansamaliGamage	ASP.NET Identity: Customize User Authentication	Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Excellent article!” Jeff Fritz: “Don’t use images of code when you can write it inline. Choose one format for code in your article. I see code images, pre-formatted text using several different formatters and formats. Great depth to your content” SYEDSHANU: “Great Article, with good format and Source Code download. Thanks for sharing” Sabah Shariq: “Great article! with everything you need to get started and good explanation on password history validation feature.” Gaurav Kumar Arora: “Very detailed write up, nice use of images. Good use of wiki guidelines.” Khanna Gaurav: “Excellent work. Covers everything required for User Management with samples.” Ovais: “Excellent article, explained very well.”
	Fiyaz Hasan	ASP.NET Core Custom Request/Response Formatters (Yaml Formatters)	Ovais: “Nice article, explained well and in brief. There is one type InputFormmeter in first para that needs to be corrected.” Jeff Fritz: “There’s a lot of code in this article without any comments in the code or prose around the code to indicate what it is doing or why it was written. What do the SupportedEncodings and SupportedMediaTypes collections do in this class? Why are you adding those values to these collections? I need to click the images in order to read the content. Shrink the window before screenshotting” SYEDSHANU: “Nice article but article needs lots of improvement like image need to be uploaded in TechNet don’t use external links,missing TOC,Source Code.” Sabah Shariq: “Nice. Could be improved with more Explanation, References and See Also sections.” Gaurav Kumar Arora: “Good write up if one want to start with Yaml formatters.” Khanna Gaurav: “Nice article”

	Peter Lindgren	Rate-limited service calls	TGN: “I really liked this one, great work Peter!” Abhishek Kumar: “This is a great read for BizTalk Developers and Architect . I will be using this real world projects .Thanks for sharing Peter” JS: “Nice solution to a scenario I have a feeling will be come more prevalent! This would work great in an Ordered Delivery Send Port too.” Todd Rivers: “I like the method to control the rate of outbound messages. A common issue in integration (Hence our rate-based throttling architecture). Singleton could be expensive. However, the solution gives the user complete control of the rate!”
	Abhay Giri	Dynamic Receive Location Creation	Todd Rivers: “Interesting extension to an existing solution. Although not a fan of receiving a message, enriching it and sending it out simply to be received again. (2x message volume). Nonetheless a good reference solution that could be further enhanced to eliminate the double submission.” TGN: “nice way to create dynamic receive locations.. :)” Abhishek Kumar: “More description required on this BizTalk TechNet wiki article .”

	Peter Geelen	MIM2016/FIM2010 Troubleshooting: Uninstall fails with error – Administrator privileges required	AM: “Thank you for your contribution Peter. This is useful reference for our many, many customers running into this issue attempting to uninstall and re-install FIM/MIM.” Lasse Wedø: “Nice article”
	Peter Geelen	MIM 2016 Troubleshooting: Unable to run the Management Agent (Error: 0x8023063d)	Lasse Wedø: “Also a good contributions” AM: “Very nice, Peter!”
	Peter Geelen	FIM2010/MIM2016 Troubleshooting: Issues with deleted objects (from CN=Deleted objects container)	Lasse Wedø: “Thanks Peter” AM: “Good read!”

	Bhushan Gawale	Converting Azure VM Unmanaged Disks To Managed Disks	Eric Berg: “very important topic. thank you very much.” Dileepa Kariyawasam: “Useful Topic. Good article to explain what Managed Disks on Azure are.” Gaurav Kumar Arora: “Good write up, demo is good, a new way to describe in article.” TGN: “great and simple tutorial”
	Baran Mano	Parallel Processing in Logic App	TGN: “Sweet, nice tutorial Baran!” Gaurav Kumar Arora: “A detailed and well-explained write up, way to represent code makes this write up uniquely defined. Thanks Barn for sharing.” Eric Berg: “thank you for this contribution – well done” Dileepa Kariyawasam: “Good Article. References, See also sections are missing.” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Your off-site images were not loading at all; which killed the purpose of article entirely. You can try to upload the image to TechNet, in future, so that they are always available? :-)”
	Ken Cenerelli	Deploying a Bitbucket repo to Azure App Service	Dileepa Kariyawasam: “Excellent article well presented with a structured layout.” Gaurav Kumar Arora: “Good write up, nicely describe a deployment of a Bitbucket repository. Thanks Ken for sharing.” Eric Berg: “thank you for this contribution”

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

• Azure Functions – Entity Framework by Chilberto
  TGN: “Azure Function is so powerful! great work on this article!”
  Eric Berg: “thank you for this contribution”
  Dileepa Kariyawasam: “Useful article. Well written.”
  Gaurav Kumar Arora: “One more good article on Azure functions”

	Chervine	Microsoft Bot Framework Basics: Building Intelligent Bots (Part 1)	Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “This is one of two parts series of articles. both very good articles and well written.” Peter Laker: “Nice series!”
	Sabah Shariq	Visual Studio 2017: Getting Started with Help Viewer	Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “The article is very detailed and it covers the topic well, Great article. Well written and the topic is very useful. I love the closing part under the download section. I notice a counter at the end of the article. This is a nice options authors can add in order to get statistics.” Peter Laker: “Very detailed!”
	PriyaranjanKS	Working with R Programming for Data Analysis using Microsoft R Open and R Tools for Visual Studio	Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “WOW! awesome article. I am sure it took lot of time to write this article and the result show it was worth it Well Done Priyaranjan! I noticed that the article is missing references and/or section for “also read”. In addition several images are still stored in external website and should be uploaded the the TechNet Wiki, but yet this is impressive work :-)” Peter Laker: “Very nice!”

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

• Microsoft Bot Framework Basics: Building Intelligent Bots – Adding Language Understanding Capability (Part 2) by Chervine
  Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “This is one of two parts series of articles. both very good articles and well written.”
• Creating a Custom VR Game Controller using Arduino by Hassaan Akbar
  Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “I love it the first video gives us great introduction of what we are going to do/read. This is perfect promo video. The article is very good. With that being said, I am not sure it is related to Microsoft technologies”
• Outlook Troubleshooting: how to remove birthday calendars from view by Peter Geelen
  Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “Very nice article. The article is well written and it is very useful topic. In fact need to think about adding MS-Office as a new category. I saw a lot of requests for this.”

	M.Qassas	Project Server 2016 Configuration	Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “always useful topic! good article” John Naguib: “Thanks a lot, nice wiki” Tiago Costa: “Nice article, but a little to simple and you can already find a lot of similar articles online.”
	PriyaranjanKS	SharePoint Server 2016 : Implement Business Connectivity Services Using oData, Entity Framework And SharePoint Hosted Add-in	John Naguib: “Excellent Article, Thanks a lot for the effort” Tiago Costa: “Very interesting and complete article. Excellent Work. Keep it coming!!!” Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “nice and useful”
	Luke Taylor	SharePoint 2016: Change DATETIME column to Standard	Tiago Costa: “Practical article. Interesting.” Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “good” John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

• SharePoint Online: Tool to Import Design Package WSP with activation of required feature with PowerShell and CSOM by Amjad Khan Microsoft
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot but how you deploy wsp file into SPO Online?”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “good”
  Tiago Costa: “Interesting tool.”
• SharePoint & Office 365 Learning: Popular Microsoft Virtual Academy Courses by M.Qassas
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “NICE! always useful to provide list of video content for learning…good”
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
  Tiago Costa: “Interesting list, but is just a list and not an technical article.”
• SharePoint 2016: List and Library Limits compared to previous versions by M.Qassas
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
  Tiago Costa: “Nice resume. Very Interesting article. Will make sure to reference to it. ”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “nice and useful”
• SharePoint 2016: Content Database limits compared to previous versions by M.Qassas
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
  Tiago Costa: “Nice resume. Very Interesting article. Will make sure to reference to it. ”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “nice and useful”
• SharePoint 2016: Site Collection Limits compared to previous versions by M.Qassas
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
  Tiago Costa: “Nice resume. Very Interesting article. Will make sure to reference to it. ”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “nice and useful”
• Project Server 2016: New and deprecated features compared to Project Server 2013 by M.Qassas
  Tiago Costa: “Interesting article, useful when you need to check with previous versions.”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “nice and useful”
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
• Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder Guide by M.Qassas
  Tiago Costa: “Interesting for beginner SharePoint PowerShell Developers.”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “great!”
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
• SharePoint 2016: Web Application Limits compared to previous versions by M.Qassas
  John Naguib: “Thanks a lot”
  Tiago Costa: “Nice resume. Very Interesting article. Will make sure to reference to it. Author could just create a single article with all Limits instead of several articles. Just a suggestion.”
  Roman Nedzelsky, MVP: “nice and useful”

(good suggestion Tiago!)

	Nonki Takahashi	Small Basic Sample: Music Player	SYEDSHANU: “Wow playing music using Small Basic ,Thanks for sharing Nonki Takahashi” Michiel Van Hoorn: “Great example of the versatility of Small Basic”
	Nonki Takahashi	Small Basic: Revision Control with GitHub	Michiel Van Hoorn: “Really nifty!” SYEDSHANU: “One more great article for Small Basic which explains in detail about revision control with GitHub, thanks for this detailed article Nonki Takahashi”

	Rogge Heflin	Report Previous Business day for Non-Working Days	PT: “Thanks, Rogge. This is a useful technique that has an application in business. Thank you for sharing it. It would be good to see the end solution demonstrated and perhaps with a comparison of how the same challenge would be handled in DAX vs M.” Tomaž Kaštrun: “Very good practical case with PowerBI code for implementation.” RB: “Interesting use of M although it is more meant for data wrangling.” Visakh16: “Walkthrough of a simple M function. Some reference links on function documentations would help”
	PriyaranjanKS	Power BI : Generate Business Intelligence Reports from Wikipedia page	Visakh16: “A simple article giving walkthrough of using PowerBI to extract wiki data. The usage of images is good and would be a good one for beginners” PT: “Priyaranjan, Thanks for your contribution. This a good, simple walk-through of a typical entry-level data extract-to-visualization scenario. Honestly, I don’t think it addresses a challenge that new users wouldn’t work through on their own.” Tomaž Kaštrun: “Using Web data for PowerBI” RB: “Always good to use wikipedia to show what Power BI can. Might be interesting to use another visualization for showing mountains than bar chart.”

Chilberto

SQL Server Notifications – Polling and ServiceBroker

Visakh16: “Good article supplemented by proper use of code snippets” Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “Very nice topic for article, and well written” Tomaž Kaštrun: “A workaround for using Broker in SQL Azure”

	sridhar vishwanatha	SCOM: Business hour Monitoring for SCOM workflow in simple steps.	AB: “Very nice read!” Adam Fowler: “A good article”
	Simon Dettling	Copying a File to a Parallels-managed Mac with Configuration Manager	Eric Berg: “thank you. this is a very interesting topic” Joseph Moody: “Very detailed and well written guide!” Alan Carlos: “” Adam Fowler: “Great to see end-to-end screenshots and appreciate the extra time that takes!”
	Jeff Venuto	SCSM: Datawarehouse Jobs Failing	Adam Fowler: “More info would help such as where you see errors and what sort of errors, as well as making the scripts more idiot proof – and posting to github” Eric Berg: “thank you for your contribution” Joseph Moody: “You picked a good problem to tackle! Your script, though excellent, could use a bit more explanation though for the less technically inclined.”

	PriyaranjanKS	SQL Server 2016 : Implement Row Level Security using Predicate Function and Security Policy	Diederik Krols: “Well done!” Richard Mueller: “A great Table of Contents. Great images and code. A very good subject. We could use references and a See Also section.” Tomaž Kaštrun: “Guide through Row Level Security”
	Natig Gurbanov	Creating Pivot table with cursor dynamically	Tomaž Kaštrun: “Pivoting data with Cursors. Another – creative – way to transpose the data” Richard Mueller: “An interesting example to demonstrate the concept. Grammar can use some work.” Diederik Krols: “Nice article. For the sake of completeness I think it would make sense to also add the actual PIVOT query that yields the same result.” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Natig, a bit of references, or conclusion would have improved this by 100%. :-)”

.paul.

VB.Net – StarRatingControl

Emiliano Musso: “Very nice idea, and a good and clear article. Good work!” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “” Diederik Krols: “Nice article. I would add ‘for Windows Forms’ in the title, since there are many technology stacks with rating controls.” Mark Rideout: “Great write up of creating a custom user control. You might consider at least one public property so you can get the value outside the control.” SYEDSHANU: “Nice control Paul,It will be more good to have the download link from MSDN,Thank you for sharing” Khanna Gaurav: “Good control.” Richard Mueller: “Good use of Wiki guidelines. Good code. We need references and a See Also section.”

	Sandeep Shekhawat	C# 7.0 : Out Parameter	Emiliano Musso: “Nice lecture for starters. Keep up the good work” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “” Diederik Krols: “Nice intro to a cool new feature.” Jaliya Udagedara: “Explains one of the nicest features in C# 7. Well, I like this.” Khanna Gaurav: “Nicely explained” Carmelo La Monica: “Good topic, good explain in all parts.”
	Sabah Shariq	C# if-else statement: Curly braces or not? An in-depth analysis	Emiliano Musso: “Good review for this topic. Clean article, nice use of code blocks and images” Diederik Krols: “Truly an in-depth analysis.” Jaliya Udagedara: “Even though some might find this basic, it’s pretty important when it comes to coding.” Khanna Gaurav: “Very useful for someone wanting to learn if/else” Carmelo La Monica: “Interesting article, very detaile in all parts and good images.”
	Chilberto	Unit Testing with Entity Framework	Carmelo La Monica: “Very good article, the unit test is very important. Congrats!” Diederik Krols: “Nice article. Reader expectations would be more accurate with a title that is more aligned with the content (something like ‘Enable Unit Testing with EF’).” Jaliya Udagedara: “Demonstrates a good point which is setting a separate initializer when the tests are initializing.”

	Peter Geelen	Security Compliance Manager (SCM): Quick Links (curation)	Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “Nice starting page. A short description about Security Compliance Manager can improve the article, especially for people that came across the article “by mistake”” Kia Zhi Tang: “Great collection of resources on SCM. Thank you, Peter Geelen.” Richard Mueller: “Great to have these references in one place.”
	Peter Geelen	Xamarin: Wiki portal	Richard Mueller: “An excellent collection of links.” Ronen Ariely (aka pituach): “Nice portal for Xamarin articles.” Kia Zhi Tang: “Nice Xamarin Wiki knowledge-base repository that we have here. Another great”
	Peter Geelen	Microsoft Bot Framework: Wiki Portal	Richard Mueller: “Wow, an interesting Portal for a new topic (to me).” Kia Zhi Tang: “Thank you for starting this Bot Framework wiki Portal, Peter Geelen.”

	PriyaranjanKS	Send Mails with Attachments From PowerShell Using Office 365 and Gmail SMTP Server	Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Proper post, good outlines.” Adam Fowler: “Great amount of documentation that gives clear steps all the way” Richard Mueller: “Great use of Wiki guidelines. We need references and See Also section.” Kia Zhi Tang: “Good share of knowledge in sending emails. It will be great to see a build up of command documentation links in Reference and other related Wiki article links in See Also section.”
	Arleta Wanat	SharePoint Online: Get any object with Powershell (Part 1)	Jan Egil Ring: “” Kia Zhi Tang: “Nice explanations and Good use of See Also section. If possible, remove those hyperlink in your code. Hope to see some links in Reference section and your next article.” Richard Mueller: “Good use of guidelines. Well done.” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Arleta, the screenshots were a bit tough to read as the font was small, but I am sure you will fix them in Part 2. Good luck, though! :-)” Adam Fowler: “Good guide and I always like to see ‘sample uses’ to show what sort of things can be achieved.”

	PriyaranjanKS	Windows Server 2016 : Active Directory Synchronization with Azure AD/ Office 365 AD using Azure AD Connect	Mark Parris: “Nice and simple instuctions on how to Install AADConnect on Windows Server 2016.” Richard Mueller: “An important topic. This article has lots of information and is well written. References and a See Also section would help. The articles in this category were very close this month.” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Only thing missing was a bit of elaboration, otherwise a complete one.” Joseph Moody: “This topic always seems to cause some confusion. You did a great job in this how-to!” JM: “This is an excellent article on how to sync On Premise Windows Server AD and Office 365 Directory using Azure AD Connect.” Eric Berg: “Thank you for this contribution. Would be great if you could add other options than express too…because they are more common…” Kia Zhi Tang: “Nice walkthrough. Hope to see good references from Microsoft Docs and see also section for other Azure AD Wiki articles.”
	Mahdi Tehrani	Limit concurrent user logins in Active Directory	JM: “Fantastic article on blocking concurrent connections in AD, thanks for your contribution.” Eric Berg: “Thank you…interesting topic…good description” Kia Zhi Tang: “Nice workaround solution contribution with good See Also section and proof of concept.” Joseph Moody: “Wonderful article! I’ll personally be using this!” Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan: “Nicely done, Mahdi! But I would suggest that you also enter some text in the post, that way it would be easier to search and more readers can read the post.” Mark Parris: “Interesting and detailed approach to limiting concurrent user logons.” Richard Mueller: “This is an often requested topic. Good use of guidelines. But the See Also section should only include Wiki articles. Other references can be in a References or Other Resources section. The articles in this category were very close this month.”
	Karim Buzdar	Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC): Unable to Configure Password Caching	Eric Berg: “thank you” Kia Zhi Tang: “Nice knowledge transfer from forum with good references. It will great to have a See Also section for other RODC related Wiki articles.” Richard Mueller: “Good to know how to deal with this problem. We could use a See Also section linking other Wiki articles. The articles in this category were very close this month.” Joseph Moody: “Nice write-up for this problem! Thank you for putting it together.” Mark Parris: “Good insights on how to resolve certain password caching issues.” JM: “This is a very good article about resolving this issue, thanks for your contribution.”

———————————————– 8< ——————————————-

A huge thank you to EVERYONE who contributed an article to April’s competition.

Hopefully we will see you ALL again in May 2017’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!

Best regards,
Pete Laker

More about the TechNet Guru Awards:

• TechNet Guru Competitions