Microsoft Open Source Blog 
5-minute read + demos
We’re back from a holiday hiatus and there’s lots to catch up on, including this week’s release of PowerShell Core 6.0, which is cross platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), open source, and built for heterogeneous environments and the hybrid cloud. Learn more about what’s new in this PowerShell Core release, plus new docs, demos, and more, in this edition of the Open Source Weekly.
More Java support in Visual Studio Code: In just the past three months, the VSCode team has published 5 releases of the Debugger for Java extension for Visual Studio Code and received 400K+ downloads. With the latest 0.5.0 release, they added two high-demand features: Expression Evaluation and Support Step Filters. Alongside the release of Debugger for Java this week, the team welcomed a few new members to the VSCode Java Extension family, including Maven, Tomcat, and Checkstyle. Check out the Visual Studio blog for more details.
Accelerated Networking – now generally available for both Windows and Linux: Accelerated Networking (AN) is generally available for Windows and the latest distributions of Linux, providing up to 30Gbps in networking throughput, free of charge. The Linux deployment experience has been improved since public preview, with many of the latest Linux images available in the Azure Marketplace, including Ubuntu 16.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS 7.4, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3, work out of the box with no further setup steps needed. Read more about the GA here.
New Azure Marketplace offers: Seven new offers went live in the Azure Marketplace last month, including Elastic Stack on Kubernetes and WordPress LEMP Max Performance. See the details for all the new offers here.
Apply for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Diversity Scholarship: At KubeCon in December, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the Diversity Scholarship Fund of more than $250,000, with contributions from Microsoft, Google, and AWS. This fund, which was the largest yet for a Linux Foundation event, enabled 103 Diversity recipients to attend the conference. Scholarship applications are out for the next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Copenhagen in May. Recipients will receive complimentary conference registration, meals, and up to a $1500 travel stipend. Applications are due March 2 – apply here.
Kubernetes Vision with Brendan Burns: Brendan Burns, co-founder of the Kubernetes project, spent some time with Software Engineering Daily, discussing the project’s long term goal to democratize the ability to build distributed systems. Brendan highlighted why it’s still hard to build distributed systems today and what can be done to make it easier, including his new community project, Metaparticle. Check out the complete discussion here.
OSCON photos: Remember how much fun we had last year? Check out the collection of comic-book-style photos done by Julian Cash Photography on the Microsoft Developer Facebook page to refresh your memory! While you’re reminiscing, don’t forget to get your speaker proposal in by January 30 for OSCON in June, when the event returns to Portland.
Linux Foundation announces new Linux on Azure training course: With over 40 percent of VMs on Azure now Linux, Microsoft is working closely with the Linux Foundation on a Linux on Azure course to make sure new and existing users have the tools and knowledge they need to run their enterprise workloads on the Microsoft cloud. The course is taught by Sander van Vugt, managing partner of ITGilde in the Netherlands and author of many Linux-related courses and books. 
Apache Spark Connector for Azure Cosmos DB: Emily Lawton stops by to chat with Scott Hanselman about the Azure Cosmos DB Spark Connector, which enables Azure Cosmos DB to act as an input source or output sink for Apache Spark jobs.
Here are some recent open source updates from docs.microsoft.com, our home to thousands of pages of technical documentation, API reference, code examples, and more for developers and IT professionals.
Use Helm with Azure Container Service (AKS): Helm is an open source packaging tool that helps you install and manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes applications. Like Linux package managers, such as APT and Yum, Helm is used to manage Kubernetes charts, which are packages of preconfigured Kubernetes resources. This documentation steps through configuring and using Helm in a Kubernetes cluster on AKS.
Run a Linux VM on Azure: This reference architecture shows a set of proven practices for running a Linux virtual machine (VM) on Azure. It includes recommendations for provisioning the VM along with networking and storage components. This architecture can be used to run a single VM instance, and is the basis for more complex architectures such as N-tier applications. Check out the documentation here.
Set up continuous integration and deployment to Azure App Service with Jenkins: This tutorial sets up continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) of a sample Java web app developed with the Spring Boot framework to Azure App Service Web App on Linux using Jenkins.
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