Awesome Live Share

A curated list of awesome Visual Studio Live Share articles, editor extensions and more. Inspired by other awesome lists and meant to provide visibility to resources that can help make your real-time collaborative development experience even better! If you notice something missing below, that would benefit the community, please feel free to submit a PR or reach out to @lostintangent on Twitter 👋

Contents

• Editor Extensions
  • Visual Studio Code
    • Chat / Communication
    • Drawing
    • Miscellaneous
    • Testing
    • Time Tracking / Management
    • Version Control
    • Web Development
  • Visual Studio
    • Integrated Chat
    • Diagnostics
• Resources
  • Articles
  • Documentation
  • Extensibility SDKS
  • Workflow Details

Editor Extensions

While Visual Studio Live Share provides a rich collaborative experience out-of-the-box (e.g. editing, debugging, terminals, localhost servers), it's also fully extensible, which enables 3^rd party extensions to augment it in new and interesting ways. Check out the following extensions in order to up-level your Live Share collaboration sessions:

Visual Studio Code

Chat / Communication

• GitLive - See what your teammates are working on in real-time and get notified of merge conflicts before you commit, make video calls with Live Share built-in.
• CodeStream - Provides an integrated chat and rich commenting system, that includes the ability to easily spin up Live Share sessions from a chat thread.
• Discord Presence - Allows other Discord users to easily spectate and/or join your active Live Share sessions (example).
• Live Share Audio - Provides integrated audio calling for Live Share sessions, without needing to use a seperate service (example).

Drawing

• Drawio Integration - Provides a rich diagraming canvas, that includes a fully collaborative experience, including shared cursors for all participants (example).
• Live Share Whiteboard - Provides a real-time, collaborative whiteboard to Live Share sessions (example).

Miscellaneous

• Chronicler - Allows you to automatically record a video of your Live Share sessions, for later use/reference (e.g. sharing with the team).
• Live Share Spaces - Provides a way to discover, communicate and recieve assistance in real-time, from developers across your favorite teams, classrooms and communites.
• Peacock - Enables you to visually identity when you’re in a Live Share session, by changing the color of the workbench (e.g. title bar, activity bar, status bar).
• Profile Switcher - Allows you to define a settings profile that is activated/deactivated when you start/end a Live Share session (example).
• Quokka.js - A live JavaScript scratchpad, that can be collaboratively edited by everyone in a Live Share session (example).

Testing

• Test Explorer - Provides a shared test runner, where the results of test runs are viewable in real-time.

Time Tracking / Management

• Code Time - Automatically track how you spend your time coding, including the time spent in Live Share sessions (example).
• Live Share Pomodoro - Provides a shared Pomodoro timer for everyone in the Live Share session, which can help add some structure to your pairing workflow (example).
• Live Share Mob Timer - Provides a shared mob timer for everyone in the Live Share session, and notifies you when it's time to switch "drivers". Brought to you by the awesome folks at Pluralsight!

Version Control

• GitHub Pull Requests - Allows you to review a PR in real-time with other developers (example).
• GitLens - Enables guests within a Live Share session to view inline Git blame info as well as rich commit history. This is one of the most valuable VS Code extensions in the marketplace, and it's also fully collaborative! (example).

Web Development

• Browser Preview - Allows participants within a Live Share session to browse the same pages together, which can be particularly using for debugging a web app, or viewing documentation (example).
• Live Server - Allows you to easily spin up a local web server for static HTML files. When in a Live Share session, the local servers are automatically shared with guests, so that everyone can work on it together, without needing to manually share the underlying port (example).

Visual Studio

Integrated Chat

• CodeStream - Provides an integrated chat and rich commenting system, that includes the ability to spin up Live Share sessions.

Diagnostics

• OzCode - Provides awesome debugging enhancements, including a fully collaborative time-travel debugger.

Resources

Check out the following resources in order to learn how to get the most out of Visual Studio Live Share, understand how others are using it, and (hopefully!) answer any questions you may have:

Articles

• In Pursuit of Enjoyable Developer Collaboration - Describes why Live Share was built, and the key reasons that make it a unique product for developer collaboration.
• Collaboration Doesn't Come in "One Size Fits All" - Describes the multi-modality experience that Live Share enables for collaboration (e.g. focusing on the same thing, working independently).
• Providing a Real-Time Compliment for Git-Based Collaboration - Illustrates how Live Share can be used to enhance existing Git workflows (e.g. code reviews, pull requests)
• You Can’t Spell Collaboration Without Communication - Describes the Live Share Extension Pack, and the integrated communication experiences it adds on top of Live Share “core” (e.g. audio calls, text chat).
• Building a Fully-Extensible Developer Collaboration Platform - Describes the Live Share SDK and how it enables Visual Studio Code extensions time add their own collaborative experiences.
• Localhost Isn't Local Anymore - Goes into detail about the ability to share localhost servers as part of a Live Share session.
• Collaborative Development Requires a Shared Browser - Illustrates how to collaboratively browse web pages via the Browser Preview extension.
• Visual Studio Live Share Can Do That? - Highlights some of the more compelling features of Live Share along with some pro-tips.

Documentation

• Visual Studio "How to" - Provides a quick start for using Live Share in Visual Studio.
• Visual Studio Code "How to" - Provides a quick start for using Live Share in Visual Studio Code.
• Security Considerations - Discusses the various mechanisms that Live Share provides in order to collaborate securely.
• Connectivity Requirements - Explains the requirements for deploying Live Share within your organization's network.
• Common Use Cases - Outlines the diverse set of ways that developers are using Live Share today (e.g. pair programming, mentoring, interactive brown bags).

Extensibility SDKS

• Visual Studio - NuGet package for adding Live Share integration to your Visual Studio extension.
• Visual Studio Code - NPM package for adding Live Share integration to your Visual Studio Code extension.
  • Sample Extension - A simple, collaborative counter extension, which illustrates how to synchronize custom state between participants in a Live Share session

Workflow Details

• Remote Mob Programming