Live Share is deprecated in Visual Studio 2026. Visual Studio 2026 (version 18.12) no longer includes Live Share. The Visual Studio Code extension remains in maintenance mode. See deprecation details and collaboration alternatives.
What is Live Share?
Live Share enables you to collaboratively edit and debug with others in real time, regardless what programming languages you're using or app types you're building. It allows you to instantly (and securely) share your current project, and then as needed, share debugging sessions, terminal instances, localhost web apps, and more! Developers that join your sessions recieve all of their editor context from your environment (e.g. language services, debugging), which ensures they can start productively collaborating immediately, without needing to clone any repos or install any SDKs.
What are the tooling requirements for using Live Share?
The Live Share extension for Visual Studio Code remains in maintenance mode. Live Share is deprecated in Visual Studio: Visual Studio 18.12 no longer offers or bundles it, and previously installed extensions will be disabled in Visual Studio 18.11.3 and later. See collaboration alternatives.
What are the core capabilities of Live Share?
Live Share enables you to share your codebase with your team members via a secure connection. With Live Share, you are able to collaboratively edit multiple files in a workspace and more importantly debug your application with your teammates. During co-editing your edits are immediately seen by your teammates. During co-debugging you are sharing the same debug session of your application. This means you and your teammates can control the program execution with breakpoints and steps, but you can independently inspect variables, watches, locals, and REPLs (e.g. the Immediate Window in Visual Studio).
Live Share has a wide variety of use cases such as: investigating a bug together, 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.
By using Live Share, is my code stored on a Microsoft server?
No, the shared code resides solely on the machine of the developer who initiated the share. It is not stored or uploaded to the cloud in any way. Rather, Live Share simply establishes a secure connection between you and your teammates (which is encrypted end-to-end), and doesn't inspect or collect any data on the code that is shared.
Does this remote-based model work anywhere? Is it peer-to-peer?
Live Share's only requirement is that the person sharing and their teammate each have internet access. Secure communication between team members during a collaboration session is facilitated by an Azure relay. Your workspace (i.e. source files) is not stored in the cloud. No special peer-to-peer connection is required though one might be used to reduce latency. See changing the connection mode in our docs for additional details.
What is shared during a Live Share session?
Live Share doesn't transfer all keyboard and mouse inputs. It only communicates the data needed for each collaboration activity to your teammates' machines. For example, when you share your workspace, your folder structure is shared. When you collaboratively edit a file, that file's contents are shared. When you are collaboratively debugging, debug actions (e.g. stepping) and state (e.g. call stack and locals) are shared.
When will Live Share be released?
Live Share has been released and remains available in Visual Studio Code in maintenance mode. It is deprecated in Visual Studio. See deprecation details.
How much will it cost?
We are committed to a substantive free tier of Visual Studio Live Share for developers to use on an ongoing basis. We will be evaluating the introduction of paid tiers with advanced features as we better understand the needs of the community.
How is my code shared with other teammates?
When using Live Share, you’re making the code you’re working on available such that your teammates can access it via a secure cloud service that remotes commands from your editor. Your teammates can open and edit the files without needing to store them in the cloud or permanently store them on your teammate’s machine.
Live Share enables instant access to capabilities like the project tree, code navigation, and search. It also allows your teammates to benefit from editor enhancements such as IntelliSense.
What happens if a user goes offline, or stops sharing?
The remote model requires that the developer sharing via Live Share and their teammate must be online to be connected. If your teammate attempts to use Live Share when you are offline, they will be unable to join the session until you are online again. Additionally, once collaboration stops (e.g. you close your editor, go offline, or stop sharing), then further actions or file access by your teammates are immediately disabled.
What about screen sharing?
Screen sharing is an alternative for pairing in Visual Studio. For example, you can share content in Microsoft Teams and give control to a trusted participant. Unlike Live Share, participants work in the shared screen rather than independent editor sessions.
What about other collaboration tools?
Depending on your workflow, you can use screen sharing, pull requests for asynchronous review, or cloud development environments. See collaboration alternatives for details and tradeoffs.
What about other web editors?
With web-based editors, both teammates need to use the same web app to get collaborative benefits, which may not be their primary, day-to-day editor. Many web-based editors assume that you are building and deploying into a Virtual Machine often hosted in a cloud environment.
While this may be desirable for many scenarios, developers often want to collaborate on apps that aren’t hosted in a VM or in the cloud. With Live Share, you and your teammate can use the capabilities of the tools’ ecosystem in addition to the same capabilities available in web-based editors.
Live Share goes a step further and enables you to share a debug session. This makes it especially useful in enlisting others to help you track down issues that only happen on your machine without altering their development workflow or needing to alter the application design.
Which languages and platforms will be supported?
See language and platform support for existing Visual Studio Code capabilities and historical Visual Studio capabilities. No new Live Share features are planned.
How many developers can join a collaboration session?
We currently support 30 concurrent guests, in addition to the developer that is sharing ("hosting") their project.
What is the roadmap?
Live Share is in maintenance mode, with no new features planned. For Visual Studio deprecation details and other ways to collaborate, see Live Share deprecation and alternatives.