It allows each developer to stay in their preferred IDE comfort zone, with personal theme, key bindings, and customizations intact. Microsoft believes Live Share takes pair programming to the next level. The host can also run the app and setup a secure, shared server, allowing the remote worker to access the app, and step through and debug the code. For debugging, a breakpoint set in one IDE showed up in the other. When code was modified by either developer, the changes were immediately visible to both. Because of the shared context on the host's machine, no platform dependencies, such as Node, were required on the assisting developer's machine.Įach developer could see a cursor indicating where the other was currently working. The second developer opened the link, which launched Visual Studio on her PC. When one developer, working on an Angular app in VS Code on a Mac, ran into a bug they needed help with, they created a new sharing session, and sent a link over IM to a second developer. The demo highlighted what is expected to be a common use case: two developers sharing a debug session.
It works across any language and codebase.
The extension is available for Visual Studio 2017, as well as VS Code, including on Mac and Linux machines. Live Share provides real-time, bi-directional collaboration between developers, each on their respective computers, without the need to share repos or set up a development environment. During the opening day keynote at Microsoft Build, the new Visual Studio Live Share extension was demonstrated, and is now available for public preview.