From the course: Remote Collaboration for Developers with Microsoft Live Share

Start a Live Share session from Visual Studio - Visual Studio Tutorial

From the course: Remote Collaboration for Developers with Microsoft Live Share

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Start a Live Share session from Visual Studio

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- [Instructor] One key concept to understand with Live Share is that only one person on your team can start the session. I'll call that person the host. Let's play that scenario out. I'm in Visual Studio, I go up and I click on this Live Share button to start my collaboration session, I am the host and anybody that joins the session, I'll call those my guests, so Terry would be a guest in my session. Terry, of course, can start her own session and invite me and then I'd be the guest, she's the host. Now there could be times when I'm hosting some guests and Terry wants to invite me to her own session, I can't join her session until I stop sharing on my copy of Visual Studio. And that makes sense, it would be very confusing if I had multiple sharing sessions opens in my copy of Visual Studio. Now, let's take a look at how to start a Live Share. I go up here and I click on this button. After a few seconds I see this banner appear that says the invitation link was copied to the clipboard. Now let's talk about what's happened. I have a link, that implies that there's a URL out there on the internet. So what Microsoft has done is they've opened a session at that URL and anybody that has that URL can join the session. Well that's not exactly true, there are some limitations we can put on it. We can prevent anonymous people from joining. We'll talk about that later. But for now, I'll assume that anybody that has that URL can join. So I would give that URL to my guests through any channel I want. I can send it to them in a Slack channel or a Teams message or through email, it doesn't matter. And then once they have it, they can join. Now they have to join while my session is live. If I go up here and I choose to End the Live Share Session, now the session is closed and anybody that has the URL can't join, and if I start another session it won't have the same URL anyway. So let's go ahead and actually start this session again. Live Share, I'm sharing, copy that URL. Then Terry, she's over here in Visual Studio Code, she can go to her Live Share pane and choose to do one of these actions, Join a session, Start a session and so on. Or she can click on these two buttons up here, Join or Start. So she can go in here and choose Join collaboration. You see, because I'm using the same computer the URL's already here, so let's delete that. I'll paste in the URL that I got from Visual Studio and then press Enter. And you can see I'm now connected to the Live Share. Well, I'm not exactly connected, here I am. Now this pops up and says Terry Dactill has joined my collaboration session. And over here I can see some information on Terry's side. There's a live chat available and some things like that. But that's the basics. I am the host, I've sent out the URL, Terry has joined me as a guest. Next we'll look at it from Terry's perspective. But before I do that, let's stop sharing. So I'll go up here and choose to End Live Share Session, Terry gets a message and now we're back to where we were when we started this video. We're both waiting for the other person to start a Live Share.

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