Visual Studio Live Share

Today I’m going to share with you an awesome plugin that lets you live code with other people. It is called VS Live Share.

What we’re going to do today is to setup VS Live Share. I’ll also show you how to start a collaboration session and join a collaboration session.

Installing VS Live Share

What you want to do is to install the VS Live Share extension. The VS Live share extension can be found in Visual Studio Code’s extension marketplace.

Type VS Live Share into the search box and you’ll be able to find it.

Then, click on install to install the extension.

Then, click on reload.

Signing in the VS Live Share

You will see a “Sign in” button at the bottom left corner of Visual Studio code, on the status bar. Click on the “Sign in” and a window will pop up to ask you to sign in.

You can sign in with a Microsoft account or a Github account. In my case, I use Github.

Now, you’re ready to collaborate.

What happens next depends on whether you’re starting a session or joining a session.

Starting

If you are starting the session, you can click on your name at the bottom left corner, and select start collaboration session. Alternatively, you can simply click on “Share” to start the session.

Once you started the session, VS Code will show you a notice on the bottom right hand corner. It’ll say a link has been copied to your clipboard.

You can click on “Copy again” to make sure the link is copied onto your clipboard.

This link looks like this:

https://insiders.liveshare.vsengsaas.visualstudio.com/join?0EUI09T34IISNETHUI09435

You’ll pass this link to your parter for them to join your session.

Joining a session

To join a session, you click on your name on the bottom left hand corner, then click “Join collaboration session” and paste the link your parter gave you.

That’s it.

Making it better

You might want to use a video chatroom application like Zoom or appear.in to chat and type code at the same time.