Visual Studio Live Share

We have been using Visual Studio Live Share quite a lot in our mobs now that we have gone full remote.

This a brilliant add in to Visual Studio Code that allows us to share text editor across computers, and in our case, across locations. I will not describe how to use it as the official documentation does that much better than I can.

It worked out really great but as with every tool it takes some getting used and also have some hiddens tips and tricks.

Here’s what the mob ObiMobKenobi of the Winter 2020 Stockholm class found after one week of using the tool.

Findings

• Works the same as google docs, Share text editor
• Follow a specific person
• Share terminal
• Share port; so if there is a server running on the host, everyone gets access.
• Good transition between drivers
• Not much lag

Additional comments

LiveShare is an extension for Visual Studio Code where you can share the text editor as you would with Google doc. To be able to use Live Share, you can log in with your GitHub account after you’ve downloaded the extension. To share the session, you send the created link for the shared session to your team.

At least for us sharing the text editor was rather seamless. We liked how we could all highlight text at the same time so it was much quicker to point something out to our team mates. You can also see the team mates cursor with their name to see who is typing.

The transition between drivers was a lot more efficient due to everyone already having their keyboard in front of them. We chose to maintain the mob programming approach, meaning that only one of us was writing at a time, even though vs code live chare allows people to write independently from one another in the same folder.

Important to note that anything included in .gitignore will not be visible to other people; only the person sharing the VS code session

Sharing the terminal works well. But sometimes the cursor can be lost for the share-ee. Forcing the Share-er to do the driving from the terminal. Remember to be careful with sharing your terminal since everyone that has access to it, can change anything on your computer.

Sometimes newly created files do not show up for the share-ees. This can be solved by either rejoining the session or selecting the user who created the file and going to the file that user is editing at the moment.

Additional tool

Thank you ObiMobKenobi (Nicole Restrup, Axel Elgenstierna, Douglas Eskelius and Liam Wears) for sharing that.

One additional tool that we found useful, in the class, was the Live Share Pomodoro add in that helped us to keep track of time and when to change drivers.