Microsoft Corp. is hoping to woo developers this week with major updates to its Visual Studio and .NET Core development platforms that promise greater performance and more accessibility.

First up is the release of Visual Studio 15.3, where the main focus has been on making the platform more functional and accessible, Microsoft said in a blog post.

Visual Studio is an integrated development environment that’s used to develop software programs for Microsoft Windows, as well as web sites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. The update comes with several new improvements focused on improving Visual Studio’s functionality, including support for Azure Functions and Broad Azure sign-in. The update also comes with improved container support and new continuous-integration tools that allow developers to deploy, modify and extend their apps across the Azure App Service.

In addition, Microsoft claims a whopping 1,700 accessibility improvements over the previous version that are designed to make life easier for developers.

These include improvements to Visual Studio’s debugging tools, such as the Call Stack, Locals, Autos and Watch windows, all of which have now been made accessible to screen readers. Meanwhile, the Visual Studio editor’s text adornments feature, which notifies developers of features available at particular points on a line of code, such as breakpoints, lightbulbs and error and warning squiggles, has been made more visible.

Performance improvements are the main focus for .NET Core 2.0, which is a development framework that’s proved to be especially popular with developers as it enables them to write applications in any kind of programming language, such as VB, C#, C++ and more.

The main focus with the .NET Core 2.0 release is on improved functionality, though the update also noticeably increases the number of application programming interfaces available, Microsoft said in a second blog post. Functionality improvements come in the shape of something called Live Unit Testing, which provides real-time feedback directly in the editor on how code changes are impacting application testing.

Another major update sees support for containerizing ASP.NET Core applications as Windows Nano images. Windows Nano is a stripped-down version of Microsoft’s Windows Server, designed for running cloud applications and containers. In addition, Microsoft has added support for Apple Inc.’s Mac computers, which means developers can now build .NET Core 2.0 applications, libraries and services using that particular platform.

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