Keyvan Nayyeri

As you may know, jQuery is one the recent rocking open source technologies on the web that could receive a great acclaim by all web developers and designers. This rich JavaScript library that is built for two main goals (lightening the size of JavaScript code and enhancing the features) could immediately become a beloved technology among ASP.NET developers, and most likely you have heard about it on .NET blogs, forums and communities.

jQuery could catch more importance among .NET developers since ASP.NET MVC was introduced and people preferred to use it as the fundamental of their client-side manipulations and AJAX scenarios. Many of the samples and tutorials written by MSFTs and third party authors are provided for jQuery to make things better.

jQuery was important enough to persuade ASP.NET team to include a built-in support for jQuery in the ASP.NET and Visual Studio and this decision is made public a few minutes ago, when John Resig from jQuery team and Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman from Microsoft wrote their announcements detailing this support. Latter Scott has a good introduction to this support scenario with a sample code that is worthwhile to read.

As is noted by both Scotts, jQuery will be ported to the ASP.NET without any change and under its original MIT license, and there will be a built-in intellisense support for this library in Visual Studio like the cool JavaScript intellisense in Visual Studio 2008.

This is good news because I’m sure that there is no body out there who disagrees with the fact that jQuery is the best alternative for traditional JavaScript development. As someone who’s actively working with the ASP.NET MVC, this is also good news for me because it helps me rely more on the usage of this modern technology in my works.

Moreover, this announcement is good to hear because of the shape that it can give to our future plans for our Beginning ASP.NET MVC book. There is a dedicated chapter for AJAX that I should write in the near future, and now I can simply work on this stuff.

I’m definitely looking forward for PDC08, an event that always have had the best and hot news about Microsoft development technologies, and this year it’s going to bring news about ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio 10 along other things.