Visual Studio 2019 - Individually Evaluate Live Share

You might have seen multiple references about the Live Share feature of Visual Studio 2019. If not go here - Live Share.

To get the benefits of Live Share, you need a team of member/s and then you can explore all features with your team members. The use case here is that before introducing it to your team, you want to individually learn how it works. You can do this by running 2 instances of Visual Studio. I used VS 2019 for this article.

I have a console application for testing this Live Share feature. In the below image, you can see the Live Share button on the top right corner of the screen.

Visual Studio 2019 - Individually Evaluate Live Share

Once you've clicked the above-mentioned button, you will start sharing in Live Share. See the below picture for reference. Also, notice that once you started sharing, a unique link is created which you would share to the people you want to collaborate with, for this console application development.

Now, I am trying this Live Share feature alone and I can only share it to myself. So, open a second Visual Studio instance and click the below-shown menu to join yourself to your own LIve Share session. In real time, this second instance is not needed, because the below operations would be done inside Live Share Joining person's machine and Joining person's VS instance would be running inside that machine.

Now, a dialog window will open automatically. Copy your Live Share URL which is running in your first VS instance, on it. Another point to notice is that the Solution Explorer of this new VS instance is blank.

On click of the "join" button, you see the magic of attaching the console application to this new instance of VS too.

Now, two instances of VS are running in parallel. Again, in real time, this second instance is not needed, because Joining operations would be done inside Live Share Joining person's machine and Joining person's VS instance would be running inside that machine. You can differentiate for who is sharing and who has joined by the status displaying on top right side of each VS instances, which I marked with the red box. Now, you are collaborating with yourself!!! Let's test some collaborative flows.

Probably, you are sharing in the 1st instance and your Lead joined to you for some code correction in the 2nd instance. Please notice that whenever the 2nd instance of VS is modifying the code, the same is reflecting inside the 1st VS instance too and also getting an informative alert.

Now, after code modification, your lead tried to run the application inside the second VS instance. But it says he needs the permission from you for that; so Live Share is not just blind code sharing but there are some permissions included which are handled by the person who is sharing.

The above-mentioned setting can be enabled inside the VS first instance by the person who is doing a live sharing, using Tools -> Options menu. See the below picture.

Now, your lead starts to debug inside VS 2nd instance and it will appear in the first instance too.

Now, we have solution explorer for visibility of solutions and projects. What's available for Live Share? We have a separate Live Share Window where we can see all participants of our Live Share and also the control panel too.

Joiners can leave and sharing people can end a Live Session. See the below pictures.

Additionally, you might be interested to verify whether the terminal window can be shared or not. Many of us do PowerShell execution and more through the terminal window. So, collaboration here also matters. You can share the terminal window either in read-only mode or read/write mode. You see 2 terminal windows opened for VS instance 1 and 2 each. You observe the command output reflection too across these 2 terminals.

So, I am impressed by this evaluation. You can get rid of issues related to the screen sharing and the most important fact is that now you don't need to be out of VS for a code share.