SkyDrive gets an (unofficial) API

Greg Duncan points to a very interesting third-party tool designed to help .NET developers connect to Windows Live SkyDrive:

I’ve been waiting, and waiting and waiting for an official SkyDrive API. Since SkyDrive was released in 2007 (yes, SkyDrive has been available since 2007), I’ve been whining about the lack of an API. Sure there’s unofficial ways to work with it, third party utilities, etc, but lack of an official and supported API bugs me. And it’s not like Microsoft isn’t using some API in their growing list of services and app that use SkyDrive. sigh…

Anyway… This project looks interesting and seems to be constructed in such a way as to if there ever is an official API, it could be updated to use it. Using an unofficial API is always a risk, but if it’s the only game in town…

According to the project description, the SkyDrive .Net API Client (available from CodePlex) is an open source client for Windows Live SkyDrive developed in C# for the Microsoft .NET Framework. It “allows developers to easily integrate Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive online storage and sharing services into their own applications.”

The author goes on to describe a little background for the project:

At the time of this writing, as far as I know, there is no official API to use for SkyDrive. However, there are several legacy applications (Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft Office) and open source tools (SkyDrive Simple Viewer for WebDAV) which are already using some sort of, non-documented web services like SkyDocsService, Live API and SkyDrive WebDAV. This project integrates/wraps those web services into one, single service client in order to provide a super set of all the features available -one by one- in those individual web services.

I suspect Microsoft will be announcing something in this space when it unveils Windows 8 at the Build conference in September. The question is whether it will eliminate the need for a third-party tool like this.