With only a few days until the end of the year, what better time to sit and reflect on the year that was?

2013 was a big year for IT Pros, with the general availability of the R2 wave of releases, the rise of the mobile worker, the continuation of the Windows 8 vision with Windows 8.1, more resources to help you build a hybrid cloud, a smashing TechEd Australia 2013 on the Gold Coast and lots, lots more.

Over at the Microsoft Virtual Academy in 2013, developers, IT professionals, and aspiring technologists took more than 1.1M hours of on-demand training across 300 courses, in over 11 languages.

In case you missed them, here’s the top TechNet blog posts of the past six months, as voted by your finger-tips:

Business Intelligence

Get Started with the SQL Server 2014 CTP1 and BI

“Data Explorer” is now Microsoft Power Query for Excel

Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 – New Samples Video Launched – View Now!

Cloud

Microsoft Wants to Help VMware Experts “Future-Proof” Their Career

VMware Migration… Like You’ve Never Seen

Mark Your Calendars for Oct 18: The R2 Wave is Coming!

Data Platform

Introducing Power BI for Office 365

EF6 Release Candidate Available

EF Tools Open Source

Developer Tools

Visual Studio 2013 Launch: Announcing Visual Studio Online

Visual Studio 2013 New Editor Features

Visual Studio 2013 available for download

Server and Management

Exploring Windows 8.1 Start Screen and Start Button Options and Configurations

Breaking News! Reduce the size of the WinSxS Directory and Free up Disk Space with a New Update for Windows 7 SP1 Clients

Remote Desktop Protocol 8.1 Update for Windows 7 SP1 released to web

Enjoy the last couple of days of the year! If your family and friends are scattered around the globe, the Skype team has some tips on staying up past midnight and keeping in touch with your loved ones in different time zones.

Over at the Fire Hose, you can meanwhile find out how to juggle several devices with family members – useful if you have a relative who keeps borrowing your tablet to play games on! And don’t forget these helpful tech tools and tricks if you’re hosting a holiday party this year.

See you in 2014!

Katherine.

Hi everyone,

Can you believe there’s less than two weeks left until we say goodbye to 2013? As Macca said in our final Flash newsletter for the year, it’s that time of the year “when our change freezes happen and we hope against hope that the on call pager doesn't go off during the Christmas and New Year break as there is nothing worse than working on a server after a little too much egg nog and brandy custard.”

If you have got some free time over the break, and want to catch up on some reading, scoot over to Jeffa’s blog – he has posted a wrap-up of five free eBooks published recently by Microsoft Press. There’s a wide range of topics to choose from, and you can download in a variety of formats to read on your preferred device as you recline on the couch. And be sure to check out our MSAU Tech Facebook page, where all your favourite evangelists are doing an Ad-vangelist Calendar countdown!

From the IT Pro team at Microsoft Australia, we hope you have a safe and relaxing holiday season and look forward to catching up in 2014.

Best wishes,

Katie, Katherine, Pat, Jeff and Macca.