Examples of Use Cases

Why use Live Share?

Live Share can come in handy in a variety of situations.

In the case of students, imagine you’re in a group project with three other students. Unfortunately for your group, the only work that has to be done on the project is within a single file, meaning every member of your group will only interact with that one file. This means that if you were to want to have every member of your team working in the file at the same time to maximize efficiency, the only way your group would be able to keep track and sync the code would be with Git. Unfortunately, many issues might arise because of this such as merge conflicts when you try to sync the code (Which you can check the git section of this document to learn how to navigate) or people working on the wrong section of the code (Which you can check the trello section of this document to learn how to avoid such misunderstandings). Rather than deal with these problems directly, we can just have everyone be able to see the entire document as it’s being typed live. This would mean there would only ever be one live copy of the file, meaning it’s impossible for merge conflicts to occur. It would also be incredibly easy to see if someone is working on the wrong part, as everyone else working on the document will see it being changed live.

Live Share’s utility isn’t limited to just students, it can also be used in workplace settings just as easily for the same reasons as above and more. For example, if a company didn’t want to use Git or some alternative for file hosting, perhaps out of confidentiality concerns, they could instead just have one copy of whatever project they are working on that everyone interacts directly with through Live Share. This would ensure the only place the files are hosted is on a computer the workplace should already trust.