Thursday, 20 October 2011

Skydrive Library for Windows Phone v1

   I've started this project before Build. At that time I didn't know what Microsoft was preparing for the skydrive REST Api so there was no way to fully access your skydrive folders and files. The idea was to be able to get the modified files (word, excel) from Skydrive back to the dropbox account (a lot of people requested that feature and, as you probably know, in Mango you can save the files directly to your skydrive account). So I've started by contacting the people that already had developed applications that use Skydrive for Windows Phone 7 ( it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel if you can borrow or buy one) . I've found 2 applications: Sky Wallet and the other Skydrive Player and the answers from the developers were not what I was expected: the first one pointed me to Skydrive.Net which is(was) unusable for Windows Phone and then didn't replied to my other emails (so I understood it was disturbing for him to share his work) and the other said that the source code was not really clean (so more or less I don't want to share it). The only option was to start digging up and find out how they did it (that day I've also promised to myself that i will publish the code even if this will mean that the application I have in the marketplace will loose some value) It took me more than I expected  to understand and implement the mess (for me it's a mess) behind the WebDAV, but the results are not bad ... it works. The source code is quite a mess but it's free and you can use it (if I wait to have time to "clean" the code I will never publish the library). When the REST api will be out of beta (you cannot publish an app with the beta sdk) this library will be obsolete, but till then you can use it in your applications and they will pass certification (at least mine did ... till now ). The list root folder method is slow because I have to call two methods in order to have all the files and folders. You will also find a test project that will show you how to browse your skydrive. Creating folders and uploading files are not implemented in this version and it doesn't make sense to implement them because it will be much easier to do it with the REST api. If you need this functionality contact me and I will point you in the right direction.

  The project is published on Codeplex: http://wp7skydrive.codeplex.com/
  
  If you have questions, need support, or want to improve the library please let me know. If you wanna see a better integration of the library than the simple test project you should buy my dropbox client Boxfiles :) .

NAMASTE

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