SkyDrive .Net API Client

CodePlex:SkyDrive .Net API Client

Project Description

SkyDrive .Net API Client allows developers to easily integrate Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive online storage and sharing services into their own applications. It's developed in C# using .Net 2.0.

What is this?

This project is an open source client for Windows Live SkyDrive written for the Microsoft .NET Framework. This is NOT an offical, Microsoft API (and to be honest, it's not a true API)! However, this library will greatly facilitate the development of 3rd party applications for developers already familiar with the Microsoft .NET technology stack.

How does it work?

At the time of this writing, as far as I know, there is no official API to use for SkyDrive. SkyDrive Client uses the same communication protocols as a web browser: it's requesting HTML pages, parsing them (thanks Html Agility Pack project) and posting back HTML forms filled appropriately. Consequently, SkyDrive WebClient heavily depends on the design of SkyDrive's HTML pages, even small design or structural changes could easily break partially or completely this library - please keep this in mind when you are about to use it in critical/billable projects!.

How to use it?

Check the samples delivered by the source code for examples.
Additionally, you can check related project Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin.

SkyDrive API

From Micrsoft's site:

Windows Live Application Based Storage API

These Community Technology (CTP) APIs have been deprecated. For the latest information on Live Service APIs, please see http://dev.live.com.

Community Technology Previews are designed to shape our technology by giving developers early access, allowing them to “kick the tires,” and provide us valuable feedback. CTP releases explicitly do not allow for use in production-style environments (see terms). This allows us to get our offering right before we have customers bet their businesses on us. We apologize for any inconvenience deprecating these specific CTP APIs has caused.

Open Source SkyDrive Code

From CodePlex
SkyDrive Viewer
Lets you browse your own personal files and folders that you have on SkyDrive by getting you to sign into the program using your Windows Live ID.

Use SkyDrive to add live app updates

UPDATE: 5/6/2009
SKyDrive now changes URLs to files several times a day.
I altered my design by fetching the URL of the folder containing my update file and then parsing out the file URL from there. Bit more work but I can still host updates from a Skydrive folder.


Microsoft is offering large amt of disk space with an Windows Live acount (25 GB) where you can host files or any type for in private, shared or public folders.
Uploaded files get a GUID like URL. It you re-load the file it will get a new URL! This caused me abit of grief trying to implement an live update feature in my Digital Rockhound's companion application. To solve this problem, I decided to add meta content name value pairs for current version of the application and the URL path where the update is located on SkyDrive. My application simplies downloads a specific blog entry, reads the version and path from the meta conent and then determines if the user has the latest version. A bonus of this method, is with site tracking, I can tell how many users are updating the software and when. Nice to have these stats.

As of 12/06/2008 Microsoft has not published documentation for SkyDrive API. I hope they do so soon. (Lets see how SkyDrive API searches this blog entry generates...)