  Nowadays, Virtual Observatory standards, resources, and services became
powerful enough to help astronomers making real science on everyday basis. The
key to the VO success is its entire transparency for a scientific user. This
allows an astronomer to combine "online" VO-enabled parts with "offline"
research stages including dedicated data processing and analysis, observations,
numerical simulations; and helps to overpass one of the major issues that most
present-day VO studies do not go further than data mining. Here we will present
three VO-powered research projects combining VO and non-VO blocks, all of them
resulted in peer-reviewed publications.
