Wow...AMAZING…Hurray…I mean, like, WOW man…

In a very welcome turn of events, JQuery is now “officially” going to be part of Asp.net development. MS will provide support, annotated VS versions that’ll give us intellisense, provide us with demonstrations and tutorials on how jquery can work with features like the AJAX Control Toolkit, Asp.Net AJAX, client side templates – and all the time without modifying, forking or otherwise changing jquery. This is surprising, and in a very pleasant way.

When I looked at the Asp.net AJAX Roadmap a while back, I thought that a lot of it was what jquery does (css selectors, anyone?). I actually liked the idea as I use JQuery a lot, and it appeared a lot of the neat features were headed our way. I was grateful cause I do believe community interest in jquery is what put those features in the roadmap. I thought that was the best we could expect…and I thought the only “better” move would be for MS to buy jquery.

Well, MS seems to have done even better with this move. Instead of killing it off, they’ve joined it and are going to make it an even better experience using jquery alongside asp.net. This works so well for the “Dark Empire” persona of MS and integrates so nicely into the ecosystem. Well done, bravo, outstanding…can’t say it enough time really.

Scott Hanselman has put up a tutorial already on how this’ll work with Astoria (ok…ADO.Net data services, but Astoria is such a cool name!) and client templates. I’ve been using asp.net AJAX and jquery together for some time now. And I can say it works exactly like I expected it to work. No need to re-learn MS-specific jquery, no hassle – it just works.

And lastly, MS will provide bug reports, patches, tests etc. to the jquery project and “These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process.”

  • “If you can’t beat ‘em…buy ‘em”.
  • “If you can’t beat ‘em…join ‘em.”
  • “If you can’t beat ‘em…support ‘em and make ‘em even better for your own benefit.”

I never imagined option 3 was even possible for MS. All I can say is I’m jumping for joy!!