VS Live Share without signing in

[leidegre]

Would it be possible to launch a VS Live Share session without an account? Simply by sending a one time use only link to a colleague or friend over, say Slack?

It would greatly lower the barrier of entry and encourage people to try the feature. I really don't like the idea that I have to sign in to use an extension which otherwise seem like a really nice thing.

[Priya91]

It is not possible today to do this, the very purpose of liveshare is for collaboration with different user identities, to remove user identities from the collaboration experience amounts to anonymous access to your source code, and running programs on your machine.

cc @lostintangent

[leidegre]

@Priya91 obviously, you would 1.) not send an invite to someone you do not trust and 2.) not accept that they join the session if you do not trust that they are who they say they are.

Identities (that can be verified) can be provided in a multitude of ways, a Microsoft account is not the only way to do that nor is it necessary to have an external identity provider in the mix. You could just as easily set a password to protect the session, if you are really worried about the wrong person getting access.

As a final example, let use ssh. If I my colleague sent me a public SSH key we could use that as his identity. The burden lies on us to make this exchange in a secure manner but that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Regardless, I'm assuming that I have to accept that my workspace is accessed before it actually is.

[Chuxel]

@leidegre Thanks for the feedback - Absolutely something we've been thinking about. I'm merging this in with #3 which covers this (and probably also gives you an idea that it's been on our mind for a while 😊)

[zaturalma2]

I do not understand why this is closed and it should not have been merged into the other issue, as that was about joining anonymously (which is a great feature, I always use it that way, thank you) . The poster wanted to start a session (host it) without logging in to a Microsoft or a Github account and as far as I am aware this is still not possible. This is something I would also like to do as the whole logging in to Microsoft or Github simply does not make sense to me and I find it annoying. As a host I am solely responsible who I let into my session and nor Github nor Microsoft should have any say in the matter and since the join process is possible with links there is no need for accounts.