Live Share now included in Visual Studio 2019, available for VS Code | Hacker News Reader

Live Share now included in Visual Studio 2019, available for VS Code

devblogs.microsoft.com

72 pointslostintangent29 comments

PM for Live Share here! Our team has _loved_ working with the community on this product over the last year, and we're excited to reach this milestone, and get even broader feedback (https://github.com/microsoftdocs/live-share). Developer collaboration is something we're very passionate about, and so we're keen to continue learning how to make it even more enjoyable and efficient for everything from pair programming, interactive classrooms, team brown bags, onboarding/mentoring, code reviews, hack-a-thons, etc.

Live Share is now available for both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (https://aka.ms/vsls-pack), including the ability to collaborate between them! So if you're using either one of those tools, and you get a chance to check out Live Share, please don't hesitate to share your thoughts and let us know how we can improve further. Also, if you're new to Live Share, and are curious why we built it (great question!), you can check out this article for a little more details: https://aka.ms/vsls-why.

I work remotely, and live share has VSCode has been an absolute godsend for me. Thanks for work you do. Looking forward to downloading the bits for vs 2019.

That's so awesome to hear! Our team is partially geo-distributed, and so we care deeply about helping improve the way that modern teams can collaborate together. Let us know how things go after you upgrade to VS 2019!

(I haven't used it, just browsed documentation. My questions are based on no experience.)

This looks really cool. I've done a couple live coding streams with someone working with me as a sort of collaborative effort. I see a lot of potential for this replacing live streams for this sort of thing. Do I have to know every guest? Can I provide a link for viewing guests to access?

It looks like the current implementation is either fully open or read-only for all guests. There seems to be no way to ... "assign roles". Am I wrong?

We actually see folks using Live Share for streaming all the time. What you can do is share in read-only mode, and then explicitly grant read-write access to specific participants. That way, you can give the session link to your viewers, and allow them to interact with the code, while only allowing specific guests to edit.

That sounds really ideal. Thanks for the response.

Would you be able to comment on how Microsoft is allowing these sorts of projects considering I imagine it would cut into Visual Studio (paid version) revenue? I've almost completely switched over to VSCode from Vim+Ctags and it's also converted a few of my Linux using friends over as well. Essentially, how in the world does this fund your team? Not that I'm complaining, but it really does seem like a monumental effort.

Within Visual Studio, our team culture is very focused on solving customer pain points, and ensuring we can address the broadest set of developers possible. Over time, we hope that some of those developers consider using other Microsoft products (such as Azure), assuming we do a good job of providing a delightful and integrated experience. Additionally, there’s plenty of value within the Visual Studio SKUs, which allows us to decide which features are available in each. We decided to make Live Share available across all VS SKUs and VS Code, because we believed that real-time collaboration was something that is applicable to the vast majority of developers.

Send my thanks to whoever was responsible for making CodeLens gradually available in more SKUs. I think in 2015 it was Enterprise only, then Pro and above only in 2017 and in 2019 it's in the Community edition. Super useful feature that I notice VS Code has been inspired by also.

I'll make sure to pass this feedback on to the right folks!

Thanks to you and the team for all your hard work. Live Share has been very helpful to me for teaching junior programmers and pair or swarm programming.

I'm happy to hear that! Helping teams incorporate swarming into their routine is something we've been keen to help with.

Planning support for KDE instead of installing the gnome keyring for secret management?

Thanks for bringing this up! We have a GitHub issue tracking this, and we'll make sure to re-prioritize this very soon (https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/issues/205).

I LOVE Live Share! We use it extensively at App Academy to allow people from all over the world to pair on projects! It's so great! Would love to have a conversation with you about all those things you are keen on learning!

I'd love to connect! Wanna send me an e-mail and we can setup a call? (joncart@microsoft.com)

I've been rediculously impressed with the Live Share team and how they've been transforming the dev community's perception of Microsoft as a whole.

Our team of ~12 devs has gone from extremely anti-MS to very open towards Microsoft. Only two of our devs still use code editors other than VSCode and Live Share is the one killer feature.

Fantastic work!

Can live share be self-hosted? I work in a very... conservative company which isn't fond of external cloud services, especially when our IP is involved.

Not currently, however, we do have a way to enforce that Live Share sessions can only occur over the local network, as opposed to using the cloud relay: http://aka.ms/vsls-connectivity#changing-the-connection-mode. Ping me if you'd like to chat further about requirements and how we could unblock your team! (joncart@microsoft.com)

Thanks. That wouldn't either I'm afraid because our firewalls are locked down too.

Live Share has been super fun to use, and the one underrated capability is the ability to build extensions on top of it. I built a text chat extension[1] on Live Share, and I'm keen to see more extensions that bring shared experiences for developers while writing/reviewing code.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=karigari...

Before you ask, here's how :)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/tmux_for_collaborative_editi...

Our team actually uses tmux all the time! That said, we figured there was room for an awesome collaboration tool for folks that preferred GUI-based editors/IDEs.

In addition, you can start a Live Share session, share a terminal, and then use Vim/tmux/etc. from there. A bit of overkill, but still kind of cool :)

I have actually done exactly that (because we were working on multiple repos at once but sharing a new repo on LiveShare while a session is on disconnects everyone..)

I'd love to hear more about the Live Share issue you ran into, and make sure we're tracking it (https://github.com/microsoft/live-share).

If you open a new Live Share session with a folder of code let's say, and then you want to add another folder to the workspace, this disconnects everyone and ends the session. I've reproduced it multiple times.

Ah OK got it, yeah that's a known limitation. That's something we plan to add support for very soon. Apologies for the current inconvenience!

No worries! Fantastic tool.

Hoping for Live Share support in Jetbrains IDEs.

There's Floobits, but it's proprietary and uploads your code to their servers.

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