Microsoft has released a major update to Visual Studio 2017 in the form of version 15.3. Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3 focuses on improving accessibility, particularly using Visual Studio with the most popular screen readers.
Microsoft has also made over 1,700 improvements for people using Visual Studio 2017 in a low-vision or no-vision mode.
A couple of major things that have seen improvement include:
- Debugging is much more accessible. Debugger windows like the Call Stack, Locals, Autos, and Watch windows were inaccessible to screen readers. That’s now fixed.
- The VS editor’s text adornments let developers know about features available at particular points on a line of code, such as breakpoints, light bulbs, and error and warning “squiggles.” Customers can now discover and navigate between these adornments via the new “Show Line Annotations” command set, which you can find on the editor context menu.
In addition to accessibility, this release also includes fixes for reliability issues to improve performance:
- A crash that could occur in C# and VB projects when editing linked files, files in Shared Projects, or files used in projects targeting multiple runtimes.
- A race condition when debugging C# or VB projects that could cause Visual Studio to crash when ending the debugging session.
- A crash in C# or VB projects when malformed metadata is encountered in the code file.
- A crash that could occur when compiling a local function in C#.
What’s New in Visual Studio 2017 15.3 Release
- Accessibility Improvements make Visual Studio more accessible than ever.
- Azure Function Tools are included in the Azure development workload. You can develop Azure Function applications locally and publish directly to Azure.
- You can now build applications in Visual Studio 2017 that run on Azure Stack and government clouds, like Azure in China.
- We improved .NET Core development support for .NET Core 2.0, and Windows Nano Server containers.
- In Visual Studio IDE, we improved Sign In and Identity, the start page, Lightweight Solution Load, and setup CLI. We also improved refactoring, code generation and Quick Actions.
- The Visual Studio Editor has better accessibility due to the new ‘Blue (Extra Contrast)’ theme and improved screen reader support.
- We improved the Debugger and diagnostics experience. This includes Point and Click to Set Next Statement. We’ve also refreshed all nested values in variable window, and made Open Folder debugging improvements.
- Xamarin has a new standalone editor for editing app entitlements.
- The Open Folder and CMake Tooling experience is updated. You can now use CMake 3.8.
- We made improvements to the IntelliSense engine, and to the project and the code wizards for C++ Language Services.
- Visual C++ Toolset supports command-prompt initialization targeting.
- We added the ability to use C# 7.1 Language features.
- You can install TypeScript versions independent of Visual Studio updates.
- We added support for Node 8 debugging.
- NuGet has added support for new TFMs (netcoreapp2.0, netstandard2.0, Tizen), Semantic Versioning 2.0.0, and MSBuild integration of NuGet warnings and errors.
- Visual Studio now offers .NET Framework 4.7 development tools to supported platforms with 4.7 runtime included.
- We added clusters of related events to the search query results in the Application Insights Search tool.
- We improved syntax support for SQL Server 2016 in Redgate SQL Search.
- We enabled support for Microsoft Graph APIs in Connected Services.
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