For the past few weeks, there were a few shots of Windows 8"s App Store circulating on the Internet. Unfortunately, most of them were fake. Some took on an appearance similar to this screenshot. A quick discovery conducted shortly after the image surfaced showed that the webpage was, in fact, this Chinese webpage on AppMarts.com. There was also this mockup that surfaced earlier this year on Neowin"s forums. Most of the mockups looked very similar to the following image:
While we still don"t have images of the real Windows Store, we now have confirmation of its existence in Windows 8. As spotted on the Russian blog MSWin.me (via Compixels), the author AngelWZT discovered references to Windows Store in the WinSxS folder in build 7955. The files are cleverly hidden in MSHelpUI.dll, of which this rough sketch of a possible Windows Store logo exists. The logo is currently a monotone variation of the Microsoft Store logo.
In addition, Compixels found more references in WSService.dll and WSSync.dll. The files are for the Windows Store Service and Licensing Sync Client, respectively. In the description for the Windows Store Service, it states:
Provides infrastructure support for Windows Store. This service is started on demand and if disabled applications bought using Windows Store will not behave correctly.
It appears that Windows Store will function in a very similar manner to current digital rights management schemes such as that used by Steam, where purchased products will not function without the presence of a background service that verifies a user"s license to the product.