Live-share: Allow hosts to share read-only access to a project

[lostintangent]

Currently, the preview provides file edit access to all guests that join a collaboration session, which may not be what the host actually intended. Introducing the ability for the host to specify whether the session they are sharing is read-only (potentially on a per-invite basis?) would enable them to have greater control over their project, and potentially opens up other use cases for Live Share (e.g. webinars/social coding), and may be complimentary to #3 and #52.

[vpicone]

I think this would be great for classrooms. Also the ability to have "pinned only" sessions where the students/viewers are by default locked onto the presentor's view. This would prevent them from rummaging around in the answer folders ahead of time! I think these would be two great options for a 'presentor mode.' Great for conferences, meetups etc.

[m1guelpf]

@vpicone Related to the "locked onto the presentator's view mode": https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/issues/73

[dasMulli]

Would be totally awesome for teaching remote courses!
Would give students the ability to browse around a solution and not have to read and remember code off a live stream, which may not even be possible over bad connections.

[RobGibbens]

Our instructors in Xamarin University would LOVE this feature to explore code with our online students. It would be great to be able to enable/disable this at different times during the session as well. We could make it read only, but then ask a certain student to add some code so we'd make it writable for that person, and then make it read only again when they were done. This would be an amazing asset to our training.

[jrstanley]

I would also find this very useful, again in a teaching setting.

Furthermore, having the ability to give write/collaborator access (and possibly for participants to request this) would be useful, whereby control can be handed to another person to perhaps attempt a solution and then revoked afterwards.

[stevejgordon]

+1 for the teaching / workshop setting scenario.

I agree with @jrstanley that being able to invite and revoke write access to participants would be great too.

[i-love-code]

+1 for onboarding / training / etc

An interface for managing which participants are read-only and which are not would be ideal. Possibly default access to read-only and grant editing permissions, or vice versa.

[wsay]

Same thing as many others - I teach C# on several University courses and often do live-coding sessions with around 50-60 students at a time. This would resolve our number one issue, which is only being able to display one part of the code at any one time on the large screens.

It would be useful if in terms of permissions, you could also control copy-paste, as I often don't mind showing my students code early on - but I want them to type it out to try to make sure they've considered it more then ctrl-c+ctrl-v, and that they encounter bugs and learn early on how important typos are.

[jasongin]

This will depend on VS Code adding new APIs for a read-only editor mode.

[Mannilie]

+1 upvote for classroom

I hope this feature gets implemented. I have been constantly looking for a solution to live-coding sessions with students. Considering that Visual Studio is the only tool we can use in our class-room setting.

I just discovered the feature of Live Share, and so far it's such a great solution! However, with a range of 20-30 in-class students in a classroom, letting them have edit rights is a complete and utter mess. So the ability to provide a read-only link to them is a much welcomed feature.

[jasongin]

We are actively working on this feature now. If all goes well it should reach at least "experimental" status later this month.

[isidorn]

Hi VS Code dev here,

VSCode now supports read only file system providers which should allow live-share to support this feature.
Please try it out in vscode insiders and let me know if something else is needed.
Here are the VS Code issues which were fixed as part of this:
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/51585
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/53257
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/53256

[Mannilie]

Would this mean that VS 2017 will have all of the dependencies needed to fulfil this request?

[lostintangent]

@Mannilie The comment above is about VS Code enabling Live Share to add support for read-only. However, Live share still needs to actually implement read-only support on top of the support that @isidorn implemented (VS already provided the dependencies we needed).

That said, stay tuned, since we’ll be providing an update here very soon, for both VS and VS Code 👍

[Mannilie]

@lostintangent Thanks for your prompt reply. I really appreciate the update!
Cheers for the amazing work!

[lostintangent]

We just released v0.3.623 of the VS and VS Code extensions, which includes support for sharing read-only projects! 🚀When you share, you'll see a new button in the "success toast" (VS Code)/info bar (VS) that let's you make the session read-only.

Additionally, in VS Code, there is a new command palette option called Live Share: Start read-only collaboration session that let's you start a new session in read-only mode.

Once a session is in read-only mode, guests can't edit files or control the debugger (e.g. step, evaluate expressions), but they can continue to navigate files, view any shared web apps, view any read-only terminals, etc. So it's still the same rich Live Share experience, but with the added control of preventing guest-mutations.

We still have some work to do (e.g. allow hiding read-only guests cursors/highlights for classroom scenarios), but I'm going to close this issue as resolved, and we can track bugs/enhancements via new issues. Thanks again for all the feedback, and if you're interested/planning to leverage Live Share for educational purposes, we'd love to hear from you!.

If you're interested, you can find out more info about this release here. (which includes a bunch of other stuff!).