Mark Pilgrim points to the 1.0 release of Microsoft.com Web Services. This is kind of a big deal at Microsoft.com (where I work), because it is a publicly-visible hook into a new publishing model for us. Of course, it inevitably raises some snags too; Mark does a good job of highlighting the problems with our registration process and the fact that the documentation is only available if you already have one of the recent versions of Visual Studio.
Maybe I’ll play with trying an AppleScript wrapper for the service, which will almost certainly grow in usefulness beyond listing Top Downloads. Of course, I’ll have to be very careful about doing so in accordance with the license terms, which among other things prohibit redistributing the documentation off my premises or distributing modified sample code that does not run on the Windows platform.
Update: It’s Microsoft.com Web Services, not just Microsoft Web Services as I incorrectly indicated earlier; my apologies for the confusion.