A New Developer Collaboration Service Is About To Make Its Debut In 2018!

Microsoft is all set to come up with a new developer collaboration service in early 2018. Due to which professionals could easily work in tandem even when located remotely. Known as Visual Studio Live Share, the upcoming service is expected to be one of the highlights across the globe. However, the company won’t be making any kind of preview of Visual studio live share available for testing but officials have given their word to developers that they will be able to use it to share projects with teammates or other developers while maintaining full project context in a secure way.

For those who have no idea regarding the service, it allows developers to connect remotely, edit and debug the same code simultaneously in their personalized editor or integrated development environments. The service won’t provide just simple screen sharing; they will allow developers to sync reports to collaborate; edit and debug in real-time, and do pair programming on the fly.

Technologies used by Visual Studio Live Share on the back-end

According to the company’s spokesperson- While elements of the design were informed by great functionality in Office, technology such as sharing workspaces, collaborative editing and collaborative debugging for multi-file development workflows are new and built from the ground up in the context of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

The service introduced by the tech giant enables two hard-working asp.net developers to make use of the same language. In fact, it may quite interest you to know that the company initially planned to optimize Visual Studio Live Code for C# and JavaScript/Typescript files. However, according to a spokesperson, "any file can be opened with collaborative editing, and edited by collaborators.

Apart from this, the company even announced a general availability of its Visual Studio App Center- the Azure service formerly known as the Mobile Center. VS App Center is designed for developers of apps targeting iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. The service is meant to be a one-stop-shop for building, testing, deploying, and monitoring apps.

"From a platform and collaborative debugging perspective, Microsoft is optimizing for ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js based web applications and services to start. "We expect to add support for more as developers provide feedback on Visual Studio Live Share," the spokesperson added.

Its core capabilities include

Like I said before, the new collaborative service enables you to share your codebase with your team members via a secure connection. Apart from that, one can easily edit multiple sets of files in a workspace and more importantly debug your application with your teammates. Whether it is co-editing or co-debugging, you are sharing the same edit or debug session with your teammates. Which means you as well as your teammates can control the program execution with breakpoints and steps, but you can independently inspect variables, watches, locals, and REPLs (e.g. Immediate Window in Visual Studio).

Other than this, Live Share offers a wide variety of uses ranging from resolving a bug together to showing an issue that won’t repro on another person’s machine, solving design issues, pair programming, conducting a coding interview, mentoring other members on a team, or performing ad-hoc code reviews.

However, the officials aren’t saying anything regarding the release of Visual Studio Live Share. Besides, they are also not yet commenting on whether it ultimately will be a paid subscription service.

Nishtha Singh works as a Presales Manager with a software development company named TatvaSoft UK. She relishes writing about various technology trends, management and much more.