Wow! I feel like a kid that just woke up to discover that it's Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Halloween and my birthday. Scott Guthrie of Microsoft has announced that they are committed to shipping Visual Studio with jQuery to handle their JavaScript needs. Ever since Microsoft shipped ASP.NET AJAX I've been wishing somebody at Redmond would realize how much jQuery had to offer for what they were trying to accomplish.

jQuery is an incredibly powerful and compact library. The present version 1.2.6 is only 30.3KB in its compressed version. The thing that I like most about jQuery is that it allows advanced JavaScript functions even with browsers that don't support them (IE5-8). jQuery also has an advanced JavaScript special effects API that allows the user to easily put together sophisticated interfaces. jQuery also has a nice plugin API that allows you to create a solution that can be re-used, much like controls in ASP.NET. If there is some feature that you don't find in jQuery, just peruse the plugin library, there are literally hundreds of great plugins there.

Scott Guthrie also announced that Visual Studio will provide intellisense support for jQuery. Here's what he said:

"The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1).  The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects.

"We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS."

"Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC.  New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well."

Although jQuery is an open source project, it uses the more business friendly MIT license. jQuery has the most helpful community of developers and users I've ever encountered online. I started with jQuery 1.0 and John Resig, the original author, would personally respond to any questions or problems from users.

If you're interested in seeing how to use jQuery with ASP.NET, check out Scott Hanselman's blog and Bertrand Le Roy's.