jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog

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jQuery is often a lightweight open supply JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that within a relatively brief span of time is now among the most popular libraries online.

A massive aspect of the appeal of jQuery is it allows you to elegantly (and effectively) find and manipulate HTML factors with minimal lines of code.  jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that makes it possible for developers to query for HTML factors, and then apply "commands" to them.  One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is the fact that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another.  jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands.  The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to uncover all <div> components within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear:



As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to discover a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> aspects to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row:



[Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book]

Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago.  As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already.  The jQuery library also works well to the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought,office professional plus product key, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard,iTWire - IT professionals are shopaholics, 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,Windows 7 Enterprise Key, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too.
Supporting jQuery
I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is,Windows 7 Professional Product Key, and will not be forking or changing the supply from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.

We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time.  For example:



and with a chained command:



The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a very 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 among the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit,Office 2007 Professional Plus Product Key, 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. 

We also plan to contribute tests,Office Ultimate 2007, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open resource project.  These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process.
Summary
We are really excited to be able to partner with the jQuery team on this.  jQuery can be a fantastic library, and something we think can really benefit ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX developers.  We are looking forward to having it work great with Visual Studio and ASP.NET, and to help bring it to an even larger set of developers.

For more details on today's announcement, please check out John Resig's post around the jQuery team blog.  Scott Hanselman is also about to post a nice tutorial that shows off integrating jQuery with ASP.NET AJAX (including the new client templating engine) as well as ADO.NET Data Services (which shipped in .NET 3.5 SP1 and was previously code-named "Astoria").

Hope this helps,

Scott