Introduction to Live Share in Visual Studio Code
Why Visual Studio Code?
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Why Visual Studio Code?
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Was this helpful?
Visual Studio Code with the Live Share extension allows for programmer teams working remotely to be more efficient and more in sync. During this time of COVID especially, programmer teams need a way to be able to code as if they could actually meet in person, which the Live Share extension solves. This extension's usage is not normally taught in any class but it's an extremely useful tool for all programmers at any stage of their career statistically been shown to do [9]. Visual Studio Code itself is also a highly used program in the industry as it's ease of use has been shown to allow business to produce creative code quicker than ever before [6]
Learning these tools will then surely cause a palpable boost in productivity to be seen.
Visual Studio Code, or VS Code for short, is a free source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It can be installed at https://code.visualstudio.com/ by using the information given depending on your operating system. It has a large amount of built-in functionality to make coding easier including support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring and embedded Git. It’s one of the most popular IDEs (Integrated development environments) available in the market currently in part due to its ease of setting up and it’s ability to be tailored to the user’s needs. Perhaps the most popular feature of VS Code is its support for extensions, which are user or corporation made add-ons intended to add functionality to VS Code that may not have originally been a part of it’s feature set. With this capability, VS Code is able to do almost anything you’d want it to be able to do and if it can’t do something you can make a way to do it in VS Code yourself if you so desire. There are many extensions for VS Code available but for this document, we’ll be focusing on the Live Share Extension by Microsoft.
Both VS Code and Live Share are completely and totally free. There are no costs whatsoever associated with using them assuming you already have a computer of running Windows, Linux or macOS.
The Live Share section is intended just to get you started on using Live Share in VS Code. It won't show you how to use any of the advanced features such as Co-Debugging, server sharing, and guest limitations. This guide will show you how to set up Live Share and how to use it, but not much more. If you want incredibly detailed help with using Visual Studio Code in general, check out the book Introducing Visual Studio Code (2019) by Del Sole A [10]. In this book, every single feature of Visual Studio Code will be laid out and explained. That much detail is not found in this guide but if more knowledge of the program is necessary then that guide should be a good resource.