title: SkyDrive as patcher storage server
body: <p>As of late, we started a pretty large project (C# XNA game).<br>
  It seemed to be pretty obvious solution to store all the files in a remote server, use a database for file "versions" and have the patcher download the newer versions and delete any archaic.<br>
  Now this is all nice in theory, we even found a service with the space for it (SkyDrive with the 25GB offer).
  The problem came up when it got to file manipulations.</p>
  
  <p>We're looking for:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Can programmatically download/upoad (for the patch maker) files to/from SkyDrive.</li>
  <li>Has a secure way of containing uname/pass.  </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Allow me to explain both.  </p>
  
  <p>Thing is, we had to make the SkyDrive on my personal account (due to the 25gb offer only being there for old users). I'm not very happy with someone getting my password, even though I'll obviously change it to something completely archaic, they would still get access to most of my other hotmail/msn related stuff. (I guess it's a reason to remake it all then?). So if possible I would secure the actual uname/pass inside the program. Since it's <code>.NET</code> and is compiled on demand, (and can easily be decompiled) I'm having doubts real security in this case is improbable (if it is possible to secure please do tell me how).</p>
  
  <p>On top of that, there's no efficient&amp;official SkyDrive API. This means that there's an even bigger security hole (see previous paragraph) and the communication won't necessarily work as expected). This also means there may be slowness in communication - something bad if you have 1000 users downloading the same file.</p>
  
  <p>So to formulate all of this:  </p>
  
  <p>What is the the proper way <em>(read API)</em> to use SkyDrive as a storage server for a patcher considering it's linked to my personal account?</p>
  
  <p><em>small sidenote, if I must, I can be evil and get our slow artist to host the server</em></p>
  
  <p><em>Edit 1:</em><br>
  The idea is to have anyone be able to download the client, but initiating anything requires an active account on our database. As such the files themselves don't have a problem being read by everyone. So I'll add the following: how to programmaticaly get direct downloads from SkyDrive if the files are public? The current links lead to their web UI. And I mean programmatically (maybe during upload time) as to avoid doing it all by hand.</p>