Bring back "Live Share: Create Reusable Session link"

[Al12rs]

(Non insider version)

Apparently this feature was replaced with planned sessions, which in turn was deprecated ( #4613 ) due to low usage.

Could we possibly have the original feature (reusable links) back?

Was the removal of the original feature intender or merely accidental due to the removal of the panned sessions feature?

I found this feature very helpful back when it was available and today I found myself missing it as we were working on devcontainers which needed rebuilding, which involved having to recreate the link each time.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[Avery-Whitaker]

bump

[phifa]

will this be coming back? We need it!

[fubaduba]

@Al12rs super interesting to hear that you find this feature useful. Would love to dive deeper into this. What niche does reusable links solve for you currently? We found that most users didn't find the act of creating a link when needed super high friction and reusable links were not as useful without having session context stored between two sessions.

[fubaduba]

@phifa I would love to know from you as well- how did use reusable links in your workflow?

[Al12rs]

@fubaduba The use case as I mentioned was for docker dev-containers.

We where collaborating on development of a series of microservices and where using dev containers to make our development environment for each microservice more portable and easier get started on for all the members of our team.

We would split our team in pairs and have each handle different tasks, the pairs allowed members to learn from each other especially in case where some didn't have previous experience with the language we where using (we used go, scala and js).

During development of the services though there was often the need to update the dev container, for example to update an embedded database, or to add dependencies etc.

In those cases we needed to restart the vscode instance which required sending a new invite, and manually reconnecting each time.

This became very tedious very quickly enough that in some sessions the guest would simply stop and just watch screen share of the host, greatly reducing what the guest could contribute.

After a while we stopped using dev containers due to them being too inconvenient to pair program on and the team became more fragmented between those that had the scala environment and those that had the go environments.

Basically the two subgroups solidified into becoming dedicated to scala and go respectively and there was much less interchange and crossover, while before the pairs where completely dynamic.

Hope that explained the use case and why it mattered in our case.

[phifa]

@fubaduba it's just simple to have the same link ready to go if you're pairing with the same partner for a few days/ weeks. You could call the link via a shortcut and be done with it. Now it's always multiple steps: copy link, open chat tool, look for partner, paste in and send. The other guy has to click and allow again all the security stuff, trusted source etc.

I know that instead of link you can invite via UI directly, but that only works sometimes, often the other guy does not show up as online, etc. and you still have approve the codebase again.

[derekbekoe]

Thanks for taking the time to file this issue to submit this request. Unfortunately, we’re not able to prioritize this feature over the other current areas of focus on the team. We understand that this may be disappointing. We appreciate your input and comments on this issue till now.