a tool for your gullable family and friends

well, i decided to play around a bit with the new visual studio tools for office second edition that was released today.  a while back (actually at codeslam before the microsoft mvp summit), i was talking with richard Hundhausen about some ideas to code about -- he needed a good one.  he came up with the idea of an outlook add-in for those people who keep thinking that bill gates will send you $5 if you forward the email to 11 of your friends.

an add-in that would simply scour snopes.com to see if it is a hoax.  i decided to embark on that task to see the new vsto tools.  it was amazingly simple to do and implement a custom ribbon ui add-in:

so i created "SnopeIt" (props to billwil for the mneumonic name).  when you open an email message, you'll be able to click on the Snopes icon:

and it will launch snopes.com with the search results.  i emailed the snopes contact info to see if they have any type of web service to be able to give a better user experience within outlook and play around with the form regions in vsto as well...we'll see -- but it's a work in progress.

i'm really impressed with the vsto tools and ease of implementation!