lostintangent

The same team that builds Visual Studio Online also builds Live Share, and so we care very deeply about collaboration. That said, you can spin up a new environment for a PR and then start a Live Share session from there. This allows others on the team to jump in, and leave comments, entirely asynchronously, and without requiring a specific “host” to be online.

We have a lot more to do in order to make this scenario truly shine, but we’re very excited about the possibilities moving forward. I’d love to hear more about your specific thoughts on PR reviews, and what kind of workflow your team would find compelling.

We’ve seen significant interest in folks wanting greater “device flexibility”, and so we’re excited to allow devs to use the tools they love from anywhere, and on any device. Since the browser is the universal app distribution platform, having a full-fidelity VS Code-based web editor, along with a powerful compute runtime, provides you with a companion tool (along with your desktop client) to choose the right tool for each task.

Hey All! I’m a PM on the Visual Studio Online team (as well as Live Share and IntelliCode), and we’re extremely excited to have more developers try out the product. Our goal is to dramatically reduce the cost of setup/onboarding, enable better team/classroom collaboration, and further support remote development. We believe that having on-demand, cloud-powered dev environments, that are accessible from VS Code and the web, provides a huge step towards achieving that.

Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback, since we’re very keen to begin working with the broader developer community, and learning how we can continue to improve. Otherwise, check out the service (https://aka.ms/vso), and then let us know what you think (https://GitHub.com/microsoftdocs/vsonline).

I’d love to hear more about this! Do you have automation that runs as part of your CI builds, and dynamically captures the screenshots for your documentation using Puppeteer? If so, that is so cool :)

Have you had much trouble with the automation scripts breaking as a result of app churn?

Enabling the ecosystem is a big focus for us moving forward, so I’d love to chat further about your scenario and requirements. Feel free to ping me at joncart@microsoft.com and we can setup a quick call.

Thanks! We currently use OT for the collaborative editing experience behind Live Share.

Yep that’s correct. We’re making the desktop clients remote-capable, and the providing the web editor as a “companion” experience. We want to enable devs to use the right tool for the right job.

Better enabling remote work is one of our team’s primary points of focus. Between Live Share (https://aka.ms/vsls-why) and these new remote development capabilities, we hope that we can contribute to making things easier, productive and more enjoyable for everyone.

Yep! We want the experience between the web and desktop to feel cohesive and immediately familiar (not to mention extension interop). So it only made sense to share as much of the code as possible, to ensure we can provide the best developer experience!

We call Visual Studio Online a “companion” web editor, because we expect it to be mostly useful for quick tasks, or on-the-go access. We believe that the bulk of your work will still happen in an editor (which is why we’re building remote support in VS and VS Code), but a web-based client can be really convenient for things like quick edits, or Live Share sessions.

I’m sooo glad to hear that! Don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve the product further, and also let us know if the direction we’re going resonates with you.

We’re enabling a browser-based experience because of the convenience and accessibility it can provide (e.g. running on an iPad Pro), but we’re also building remote development tools for Visual Studio and Visual Studio code, to ensure that folks can choose the right tools for them, and reap the same benefits of multi-machine portability, reduced setup, and anywhere access.

Hey all! I’m the author of this post, and lead the PM team at Microsoft behind IntelliCode, Live Share, and the cloud-based remote development capabilities described in this article. We’re looking forward to working with developers, and learning how to further support teams who are looking to up-level their productivity and embrace further workplace flexibility (yay for remote development!). In the meantime, feel free to ask me anything!

Check out https://aka.ms/vsfutures. In addition to Visual Studio Online (the web companion editor), we’re also building tools to allow developing against remote machines from Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code as well. In the case of the desktop clients, editing would actually happen locally, and synced with the remote environment. That way you have low latency editing + multi-machine portability and anywhere access.

Exactly! We want to empower developers to work from anywhere and have the flexibility to choose the editor and device that makes them most productive.

That’s OK! That’s how _many_ devs do their debugging. We don’t want to change your workflow, we just want to make it simpler to setup and accessible from anywhere :)

Thanks for the link! That post explains the broader context of work that our team is working on to improve developer productivity moving forward.

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!

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)

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

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

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'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).

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

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.

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 :)

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!

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.

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.

Thanks for posting! Visual Studio Live Share PM here.

We're very excited to have the product be both broadly available (due to the public preview release), as well as broadly applicable (due to the universal support for remote language services and debugging).

We've been rapidly iterating based on feedback over the last few months, in our attempt to improve developer collaboration, and are looking forward to hearing the broader community's thoughts. Hit us up with any questions!