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Office 2003 Research Services and Amazon data

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One of my friends, Charles Maxson, is a wizard of productivity solution development. He's also an all around great guy. He wrote a killer Research service provider for the Office 2003 Research task pane. Basically, this custom service connects up to a set of Web services Amazon.com exposes, and then displays the data rather beautifully in the Office 2003 task pane UI. It's truly one of the best solutions I have seen written for Office....ever. It's simplicity and power are convincing.

Here's a shot of the UI:

Almost as challenging as creating something like this is dissecting the solution. Frank Rice, our venerable warrior of Office programmability writing here at Microsoft has done so in this article:

Creating an Office 2003 Research Service Using the Amazon Web Service API

Take a look.

Rock Thought for the day: I was listening to Neil Young's disc, Harvest. What a brilliant piece of work. All of his work is so similar yet always so distinctive and refreshing. I never tire of it. He proves that true vocal quality is about being real, letting the instrument reveal itself purely, innocently, to expose its vulnerability in a show of strength. To all of those "artists" using egregious amounts of backing tracks for their vocals in live performances, please listen to a few Neil Young discs, do an act of contrition, then grab a microphone and really sing. You might find you had a voice and a soul all along.

Rock On

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