Wait, what happened to 5.1? 2022, that’s what—welcome to CodeTogether 2022.1, our biggest release of the year! Jokes aside, this really is a gargantuan release with many enhancements to the core coding and collaboration experience.

Here’s a brief overview of the goodness you’ll find:

• Content Assist—Blazing fast and complete
• Strong-Style Pairing—Pair or Mob program with full strong-style support
• Presentation Mode—Only the host can drive and make changes
• Collaborative Coding Improvements—New modes, synchronized scrolling and much more
• CodeTogether Pro—Everything you love without the time or user limits of the free plans, at an almost free price
• Windows 11 and VS Code 1.63+ Update—Full seamless compatibility with the latest updates
• What’s Next—Continued improvements to the collaborative coding experience . . . tell us what you’d like to see

And, even more goodness for our On-Premises customers:

• Multi-Server Deployment—Whether you want fail-safe redundancy, scalability, or team locality, we’ve got you covered
• Dashboard Enhancements—Now you’ll always know who’s doing what, when and for how long on your servers
• Compatibility Fixes—No more Log4J in CodeTogether images

Content Assist—Now Blazing Fast!

We’re always interested in improving the core coding experience, and there are few features more central to this than content assist. In this release, suggestions appear instantaneously for all remote editors, with improved proposal ordering, just like for the host in their local IDE.

Here’s a very extensive example recorded in an IntelliJ guest, connected to an Eclipse host:

Content Assist Ordering in CodeTogether 2022.1 vs 5.0

And that’s not all with content assist, we also fixed the following bugs:

• An extremely large number of CA proposals sent by the host could cause the session to break in some instances.
• Always flush—yes, we can joke about it now, but forgetting to flush a stream resulted in a one second delay that affected not just content assist, but other language features too. We’re so glad to get that out of our system!
• With an IntelliJ host, when matching against a non-exact prefix, the selected proposal could sometimes be incorrectly inserted.
• Emmet proposals were sometimes hidden in browser and VS Code clients.

Strong-Style Pairing—New Mode with Explicit Driver Control

From the very start, we’ve striven to make the collaborative coding experience intuitive, with seamless shifting of control from one driver to the next. However, in a strict-pairing programming environment, a pair or mob may desire more explicit control over who gets to drive the session, and when. To this end, when you host a session, you can now choose whether you’d like to use our new Explicitly assigned driver mode where the current driver must explicitly grant the driver role to the next driver. Unlike the dynamic mode, simply editing code, opening files, making selections, etc. will not make you the driver, even if none of the other participants are active at that moment. Please see our Session Basics documentation for more details.

Selecting strong-style pairing when starting a session

Example of a strong-style coding session

Presentation Mode—Only the Host Drives and Edits

We’ve added a third, presentation mode, in which only the host can drive the session and make changes to files. Guests can browse the workspace and open other files, but will not be able to change any files in the session, nor will they disrupt any of the other participants in the session.

Collaborative Coding Improvements— Coding Together, More Intuitive than Ever

In addition to the new mode, we’ve made several changes to the collaborative experience that will make it even easier to work together in a CodeTogether session.

Virtual Cursors

We’ve moved from a Room concept to Virtual Cursors, as many first-time users found the idea of “rooms” confusing. If you’ve been with us for a while, don’t worry—virtual cursors work in exactly the same way as rooms did, albeit with an improved UI in the CodeTogether view. If you want to code with a group, simply share a virtual cursor with them as opposed to joining the same room.

In a related change, when you host a session you can choose whether guests who join will start by sharing your cursor, or get their own cursor. You can also leave this decision to them.

Joining Process & Large Project Support

When you join a session from an IDE, a dialog will visualize the connection status and progress, guests can see their initial cursor mode and even choose a mode if allowed by the host.

This also addresses a long standing issue we’ve had where sessions hosting large projects/workspaces could not be joined from an IDE. CodeTogether will now ensure that required workspace metadata like the resource tree is loaded before you join the session, with clearly displayed progress. This prevents the crash that would occasionally occur in prior versions.

Dynamic Driver Mode

In the dynamic driver mode, we’ve significantly improved intelligence behind automated driver assignment. Actions beyond editing code, like use of content assist and interaction with IDE dialogs, will now also be taken into account when evaluating driver activity, and a driver is less likely to lose the driver role when they stop typing. As a result, Dynamic Driver Mode now behaves in a much more predictable and intuitive manner.

Pseudo Alone Mode

Even when you’re not a driver, we allow you to break away from the driver to run your own analysis or even make edits (if session permissions allow). CodeTogether will intelligently allow you enough time to make changes or browse code, bringing you back to the driver when appropriate. The time allocated for changes/browsing will be dynamically extended with continued activity on your part.

Collaboration Controls

Controls that allow you to choose another driver, start watching another participant or start coding independently have been overhauled. The state you are currently in is more clearly indicated and easy to change. You will find these controls in the editor border area for IntelliJ & Eclipse, in the status bar and toolbar for VS Code, and in the menu bar for browser clients.

Follow Scrolling

A feature asked for often, when a driver scrolls in a file, followers’ editors will follow to ensure they display the same code. The driver no longer needs to explicitly change his cursor location or make a selection for the followers’ editors to sync.

More details on each of these enhancements can be found in our Session Basics documentation.

CodeTogether Pro—Get Longer Sessions with More Guests

Do you want your sessions to go beyond the 60 minute / 3 guest limitation of the Free plan? Well, then get a single subscription to CodeTogether Pro, at a mere $4/month, and you can host sessions of unlimited length with up to 50 guests! Please see our Pricing page for details. CodeTogether Pro has been available since last month, but we didn’t have a release to tell you about it—now you know!

On-Premises Multi-Server Deployment—For Redundancy, Scalability or Reduced Latency

CodeTogether now supports multi-server on-premises deployments! A CodeTogether Locator server and multiple edge servers can be set up to provide service redundancy, load balancing and scalability, or they can be geographically distributed to reduce latency within regions. The CodeTogether locator is also connected to a database which will persist audit logs, metrics and server configuration data.

Please see our Pricing page for details; our sales team will be happy to set you up with a license you can use to try a multi-server deployment yourselves. For setup instructions, please see our On-Premises documentation.

On-Premises Dashboard—Better Visualizations and Control

We continue to improve the On-Premises Dashboard.

In this release, you’ll find:

• Better visualization of server health and status, including the ability to easily suspend servers.
• Key events like lag will be tracked per server.

And, for multi-server deployments:

• Server load is more comprehensively tracked to aid load balancing.
• An active websocket connection from edge server to locator ensures real time reporting and coordination.
• Regional server assignments can be easily configured in the Dashboard’s Regions page.

Compatibility Fixes & Enhancements

The Log4j2 Vulnerability

CodeTogether users, both of our SaaS and on-premises distributions, were not at any risk from any of the Log4J vulnerabilities disclosed in December last year. With this release, however, we have also removed the unused Log4J JAR that was present in our on-premises distribution.

VS Code Proposed API Fix

For advanced functionality, CodeTogether must have access to proposed APIs in VS Code. Due to changes in VS Code 1.63, the setting to allow CodeTogether to use these APIs would not be persisted and users would be repeatedly asked to enable access. A fix for this was already released in version 5.0.3 to the VS Code Marketplace and this is now fixed in our on-premises builds as well.

Note: If you are working with VS Code over WSL, you need to install CodeTogether both Locally and in the WSL environment for the proposed API access to be permanently enabled.

Updated for Windows 11

Changes in Windows 11 impacted CodeTogether’s ability to detect shared ports on all IDEs. This release changes to use alternate APIs depending on the version of Windows the IDE is running on.

What’s Next?

We’re going to be working on improving the core coding functionality, making sure guests’ experiences in a CodeTogether session continue to coalesce with a local IDE dev experience. Please take a look at our issues tracker and vote for issues you believe will make a big difference to your CodeTogether experience, and feel free to create new feature requests as well.

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