Microsoft Speeding Up SkyDrive on the Client Side

Microsoft on Thursday described in greater detail how it has optimized Windows Live SkyDrive, which is the company's free cloud-based storage and file-sharing service for consumers.

Steven Bailey, a development manager for Windows Live, said in a blog post that the new SkyDrive architecture "deep down is AJAX" innovation. So far, Microsoft has only redesigned the photo viewing and file browsing features in SkyDrive to use this new architecture, nevertheless the rest of the site will as well go in that direction in the nearly future.

For accessing user data, Microsoft's new SkyDrive architecture uses a protocol based on HTTP and JASON, which filters some data for caching on the client side. The Microsoft team is currently trying to make this approach "work so then across all of the major browsers," Bailey said. He added that the data format approach in JASON "is network efficient, and browsers can cache it actually fast." Microsoft earlier used a method that pulled a bunch of data from SQL Server and ran it although ASP.NET servers earlier delivering the data to the client, Bailey explained, however that server-intensive approach was less efficient.

SkyDrive as well supports "virtualized list views," which will pull only the data or HTML that's needed for a current view in a browser. This research will work as the user scrolls through lists on the screen by "dynamically fetching data and rendering the list view," Bailey stated.

SkyDrive is turning out to be a prominent part of Microsoft's connected devices architectural approach on the consumer side of its general cloud computing push. To illustrate, the "Mango" update to the Windows Phone 7 operating system, planned for this fall, will add SkyDrive access for smartphones, allowing photo storage and file sharing via Microsoft's cloud. According to Bailey, Microsoft reuses its SkyDrive code between the PC and mobile SkyDrive views, so users get performance improvements across both devices.