Contact - Need to be able to create a consistent shared link

[mtaylorfsmb]

This is in response to clicking the feedback link for the new contact feature in LS.

The existing approach to sharing out a LiveShare session via email is insufficient in a classroom environment. Even the addition of contacts doesn't really help because the "contacts" for a classroom is fixed and ideally should be set up in advance of the class. Therefore the existing implementation doesn't really solve any issues in the classroom for giving out LS links. I still have to start the session, copy the link and pass it on to students every class.

With the contacts feature in theory I would only need to do this the first class. However LS is unstable in my experience and students get kicked out all the time including when I start the debugger, when the editor stops responding, etc. These problems are getting worse and haven't been fixed in the year+ that they've been reported. So sending a notification each time the session starts isn't useful either. Contacts may be useful for collaboration but don't solve the problems of the class room.

In an ideal world I want a fixed URL that students can favorite in their browser or inside Visual Studio's Live Share menu to be able to jump to my LS instance every time they come to class. I don't want to have to: update some shared page with a link to the session nor wait for them to connect at least once so they show up in Contacts and then send them a notification.

At this point in time the contacts feature isn't useful for class and we are still stuck with the horrible approach of store the link in an easily accessible location for the class each time the session is started/restarted.

[lostintangent]

Closing this as resolved, now that we've shipped support for "Planned sessions". Those allow you to create static URLs, and should satisfy this request. Please re-open it if this isn't the case. Thanks!

[mtaylorfsmb]

This does not meet the need as I have described. The planned/reusable sessions feature is only in VS Code. I am using Visual Studio, the full developer IDE.

I'm running VS 2022 and there seems to be no such features in the current extension.

[mtaylorfsmb]

@lostintangent Please also note that you cannot reopen issues that are closed by other people even if it is your own issue. Therefore I cannot reopen this issue because you closed it.