Visual Studio Live Share allows real-time collaboration inside the Visual Studio environment.

See this Microsoft Documentation linked here for a good introduction. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/use/vs

I set up an instance of Visual Studio 2019 Preview Version as the Host on my laptop, and connected to it from a Visual Studio 2017 Instance on my Desktop. It is nice that Microsoft lets you collaborate with yourself for testing. I am logged in as the same MSA personal account.

This is very different from a screen share which is what I think of when I think of collaborating, because this is essentially what happens in the office when people gathers around someone’s machine to discuss code.

Focus Participants

The Focus participants feature allows a Live Share Participant to focus the other participants on the file they are working on.


Limitations
One thing that seems a little strange to me is that the focusing and following seems to only happen with the active Code editor window of the host or current presenter.

If for example, I want to create a new file or look at some files in the Solution Explorer, the windows that I am working in won’t be available to my collaborators.. This seems like a missing feature to me..

What Happens if I want to talk to my collaborators about the Project file structure or what type of file to create in the create new dialog.

You can however, share a command line terminal… but this doesn’t seem as useful to me as complete sharing..

I think a useful feature would be that if Live Share had a built in full screen share, so that the host can show other windows and applications.. and then switch back to normal live share mode when actually working on code…