A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced that they will ship jQuery with future versions of Visual Studio.

"We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license." - Scott Guthrie

Let me emphasize that this is as far as I know the first time I've ever heard that Microsoft is going to incorporate an Open Source project into one of their products. Usually they track down the creators of the Open Source projects, hire them and re-invent the project and then incorporate - like they did with NUnit.

By Microsoft making jQuery a part of their official development platform is a huge statement. They show willingness to collaborate with the community and embrace new and upcoming standards. - I like the new open Microsoft. Not only is this a huge statement, but also a recognition to the jQuery project. Thumbs up for Microsoft and the jQuery team!

What does this means for me?

If you are a .NET web developer you probably already heard some buzz about the jQuery framework in the blogosphere, and you might also have taken it for a test run - if not, check it out.

I believe that we will see built-in support for jQuery in future versions of their web frameworks (ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC frameworks). I guess they will release a new sets of controls that are developed on top of jQuery. Maybe we will get a jQuery Toolkit, like we did with the Ajax Toolkit?

According to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft has received lots of requests from the developers that they want support for selection and animations. - I think it's here jQuery really shines.

"Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it?  We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too." - Scott Guthrie

We will have an richer experience when developing on the client-side. jQuery is a framework which makes it easy to manipulate the DOM (Document Object Model) and to implement Ajax functionality. Guthrie has already announced that there will be intelliSense support for jQuery in Visual Studio - even richer developer experience.
So if you want to be ready for future versions of the web development frameworks on the .NET platform, you better check out jQuery!

Where to start?

I previously written a couple of posts about jQuery and using it with the ASP.NET framework. Start by checking them out: Hello jQuery! and jQuery for ASP.NET MVC Unleashed.

Rick Strahl has written lots of good stuff on jQuery - check them out.

DotNetRocks has a podcast about jQuery.

And Scott Guthrie has linked to some good jQuery resources.

Happy coding!