Microsoft Details The SkyDrive Experience On Windows 8.1

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SkyDrive Windows 8.1

If you noticed it right, SkyDrive is now an integral part of Windows. With the upcoming Windows 8.1 release, SkyDrive is baked into the OS and it has become one of the best cloud storage service available right now. Adam Czeisler, Development Manager at SkyDrive team today discussed in detail about how Microsoft built the modern SkyDrive experience for Windows 8.1 devices. Microsoft combined the advantages of JSON API design pattern of building apps and proprietary sync protocol supporting ‘CRUD’ operations into a one single solution.

In Windows 8 we tackled these problems by releasing both a SkyDrive modern app and a SkyDrive sync client. We had all the pros and all the cons of both engineering designs. In addition the app and the sync client couldn’t communicate with each other which led to some temporary inconsistencies that could be confusing to people who used both. When we started planning for Windows 8.1 we knew we wanted to do something better. Could we have the best of both worlds?

To do it, we knew we would need a solution that let people browse the full SkyDrive namespace in Explorer and in the SkyDrive modern app. We also wanted them to be able to perform CRUD operations against this dataset, even when offline. But we didn’t want to have to download the entire SkyDrive to the local device to accomplish this. Could this be done? We weren’t sure, so we joined forces with the experts in the Windows team to see if we could build a hybrid solution that gave us everything we wanted.

It is not just SkyDrive team that worked on this experience. People from Windows core Shell team, Cloud Experience team, Creative Expression team, etc collaborated together to create this one seamless experience. If you have few mins to spare, do read  the link below.

Source: Microsoft

More about the topics: microsoft, SkyDrive, windows, windows 8.1

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