How do you do, fellow developers!
Last year, Microsoft released the free VS Live Share extension for VS Code and Visual Studio . This feature allows you to share your local dev environment with other developers. Kind of like Google Docs, but for code. Except you can also share your localhost, terminal and all the other things that someone would need to actually be able to run your code; because, "Works on my machine!".
If all of this is new to you, I wrote up an article about it some time ago that you might find helpful.
For those who have been using VS Live Share, we'd love your feedback. If you would take just a moment to answer a few easy peasy questions, you will have all of our ❤️.
Over the last six months, the Live Share team has iterated a lot based on feedback (e.g. sharing source control diffs), and we're keen to hear how we can continue to improve and make the product more useful. If you have a few minutes, we'd love your input! aka.ms/vsls-survey14:12 PM - 27 Mar 2019
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For those who haven't yet experienced the magic, give it a try and tell us what you think. Feel free to drop into the comments here, or you can always connect us on twitter at @burkeholland and Jonathan Carter from the Live Share team at @lostintagent.
Thanks a million! 💵
Top comments (2)
I just used Live Share today, and heard about it yesterday. We worked for 2 and an half hours on a project and it was very fun! It was a little buggy at times, but I wonder if it was my internet connection not syncing, but no more bugs then you get with normal network things like discord and skype. We didn't use the voice or chat feature, but defiantly made use the shared local host and terminal access. Being able to follow what someone is doing and what files they are are very handy. We're very used to pair programming using discord screen sharing, which sometimes blurs the screen, so being able to see what she was working on in my own workspace in another panel was very great. Our discord messages are full of code she has copy and pasted to me for examples, so just being able to write in a file together without having to c+p or pushing and pulling from git is amazing.
I wish there was a way to 'save' friends and have them connect easier. Due to the few issues we decided to refresh the hosting and had to resend link and open in browser each time. Considering that it recognizes contacts in it's recents, it would be nice if there was some kind of join system in place while in the editor. Those are my thoughts so far, and I think this is going to be a real staple of our coding sessions moving forward!
Edit: When I installed it, it had something about slack and discord connection, but I couldn't get my auth token for discord following the steps it showed. I wonder what the features of it were, I didn't get to investigate. When I search for discord and VS code all I get is discord presence.
Edit #2: Well I don't know the official way to do it, but you can connect with through discord with the discord presence just like you do games.
What might bothers me is VS Live Share traffic going on unknown third-party servers.
Depending of the business, this can be a no go: once you can self-host your own "matching" instance server it'll be awesome.