What is Visual Studio Live Share. User experience and features are not final. Welcome to Visual Studio Live Share. Live Share enables you to collaboratively edit and debug with others in real time, regardless what programming languages you're using or app types you're building. It allows you to instantly and securely share your current project, and then as needed, share debugging sessions, terminal instances, localhost web apps, voice calls, and more. Additionally, unlike traditional pair programming, Visual Studio Live Share allows developers to work together, while retaining their personal editor preferences e. In practice, this ability to work together and independently provides a collaboration experience that is potentiallty more natural for many common use cases. In this article we'll run you through some concepts and how to install the needed extensions. If you're looking for an abridged version, check out the and quickstarts. Tip: Did you know you can join your own collaboration session. You live server visual studio code even use the same identity on both instances. Install Visual Studio Live Share Before you begin, you need to be sure you have a version of Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code installed that meets Live Share's core requirements. After that, downloading and installing the Visual Studio Live Share extension is a breeze: Visual Studio Code 1. Install for Windows 7, 8. Download and install the Visual Studio Live Share extension from the marketplace. Reload and wait for dependencies to download and install see status bar. Install the latest version of 15. Download and install the Visual Studio Live Share extension from the marketplace. Install the latest live server visual studio code version of. Visual Studio Live Share is installed by default with these workloads. By downloading and using Visual Studio Live Share, you agree to the and. See if you run into problems. That's all there is to it. Check out the rest of the documentation for what to do next. Concepts and features As with any product, Visual Studio Live Share provides a set of powerful features built up from some core concepts. This section gives you some concepts and a brief tour of features. Collaboration sessions All collaboration activities in Visual Studio Live Share involve a single collaboration session host and one or more guests. The host is the person that started the collaboration session and anyone that joins is a guest. Collaboration session hosts can use all of their tools and services but guests are only given access to the specific things the host has shared with them. This includes code, running servers, debugging sessions, terminals and more. Currently all content that is shared is kept on the host's machine and not synchronized to the cloud or on the guest's machine which enables instant access and increased security. The advantage is that the entire solution is available the moment a guest joins, and the moment a host ends a collaboration session, the content is no longer available. Guests get access to this content using the invitation link that you send them. The web link provides a quick way to hop into a collaboration session if you already have the extension installed, and a quick way to set up information if you do not. live server visual studio code You can see each collaborator's edits, their cursors and selections, and more. Even better, you are not forced into editing the same file at all times so you can opportunistically collaborate and act independently as you see fit. Note: Co-editing has a few limitations. See for the state of features by language. Learn more: Following and focusing Sometimes you need to explain a problem or design that spans multiple files or locations in code. In these situations, it can be useful to temporarily follow a colleague as they move throughout the project when co-editing. Hosts and guests can hop in and out of following one another with a simple mouse click. In addition, you may find that you want to ask all participants to follow you. Learn more: Co-debugging When you're debugging tough coding problems or bugs, having an extra pair of eyes can be really useful. You each get co-editing features along with the ability to investigate independently as you step through together. Note: See for the state of debugging features by language or platform. Learn more: Share terminals Modern development makes frequent use of a wide array of command line tools. The shared terminal can be read-only or fully collaborative, so both you and your guests can run commands and see the results. As the host, you're always in control and can decide whether other collaborators can run commands themselves or just see command output. In fact, anything you want to keep to yourself you can run in an unshared terminal. Learn more: Access controls Visual Studio Live Share provides participants with a number of great ways to collaborate. However, with the number of options and flexibility guests are given to interact with hosts, you may want to explicitly approve guests that join or lock down access to certain files or folders. Live Share has a number of settings that can help you out including read-only and requiring acceptance of guests. Relay mode allows guests located in a completely different network to connect to the host via an internet relay.
