Collaborate in style with Visual Studio Live Share

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VS Live Share lets you collaborate in real time for coding, debugging and more. You can have multiple people working in the same file and see their cursor and live code updates. You can also open your own file and work independently. All changes are saved back to the hosts file system ready to be checked into source control. It’s great when multiple people need to work in the same area of the code and not step on each other’s toes.

Setup

• Install VS 15.6 or higher
• Install VS Live Share module
  • https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
• Run VS in administrator mode
  • Make sure your VS is logged into a microsoft account

Start Collaboration Session

• File -> Start collaboration session
  • Or Share in upper right corner
    

    

• Authenticate to Live Share Services (if presented)
  

  

• Accept firewall exception (if presented)
  

  

• Send link to collaborators
  
• In the upper right corner you will see that you are sharing a session
  • You will see a list of guests
  • Each guest has a circle with their initials and a color to indicate their cursor color
    

    

• Click button to accept guests
  • You will see their cursor appear in your current file
    

    

Join Collaboration Session

• File -> Join collaboration session
  
• Paste link from host
  
• Click Join
  • This can take a few minutes to actually connect depending on the size/number of files in the solution
• Authenticate to Live Share Services (if presented)
• Accept firewall exception (if presented)
• In the upper right corner you will see that you have joined a session
  • You will see a list of guests
  • Each guest has a circle with their initials and a color to indicate their cursor color
    

    

• You will see the file the host is currently editing
  

Interacting with a collaboration session

• Follow
  • When you follow someone, your ui will automatically open the file they are editing
  • You will see their cursor move, code edits, and highlight lines of text
• Focus
  • Sends a request to all guests to follow you
    
• Solution Explorer
  • Shows the shared project in your local solution explorer window
  • Opening a file downloads it from the host
  • Saving a file syncs your changes back to the host
    • You won’t see the changes in your local source repo
    • Hopefully the don’t take all the credit for your shared work 🙂
• Code editing
  • See a color coded cursor for each guest
  • See highlighted lines
  • See code edits as the person types
• Debugging
  • When the host starts a debugging session, the guests ui will change to debugging mode
  • Each guest can control the shared debugger to step through the code and it will update all others
  • Each guest can do full object inspection independent of other guests
    
• Powershell terminal
  • Shows a shared terminal window that any guest can type commands
  • The host can set the permissions to full control or read only
• Ending the session
  • All solution and project files on the guests machines are removed
    
    

Troubleshooting

• If guests are having trouble connecting to your session
  • Log into https://insiders.liveshare.vsengsaas.visualstudio.com/ with the same microsoft account used to authenticate in VS

More Information

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/use/vs#join-a-collaboration-session
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/troubleshooting
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/reference/connectivity