Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 Released

For Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, Microsoft focused on improving accessibility, particularly using Visual Studio with the most popular screen readers. Microsoft made over 1,700 improvements but if you are using Visual Studio 2017 in a low-vision or no-vision mode, a lot has improved.

Couple of the more major things Microsoft improved.

• 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, lightbulbs, 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,  many fixes for reliability issues to improve performance, many of which were reported through report-a-problem. Here are some of the more notable ones that had high votes that were fixed:

• 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#.

Additional key improvements

• Azure Functions Support. 
• Broad Azure sign-in support.
• Improved container support.
• Continuous Delivery Tools now included.

For the full list of improvements check out the release notes for Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3.