I struggled for a minute or so today looking for a Shelveset in the VS Team Explorer. Eventually I had to open up the Source Control Explorer…

Turns out there is a simpler way.

The Key is to click on “Pending Changes”

I find this a little unintuitive, because I’m not looking for my “Pending Changes”. I’m looking for a shelveset that has already been created…

So I’m making this post to remind my self that “Pending Changes” is the home of more functionality that just checking pending changes in the local workspace…

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…