jQuery to be Included in Microsoft Visual Studio. Reports of Airborne Pigs Skyrocket.

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Those of you who care may well already know since it was announced about a month ago now, but Microsoft has announced that it will be including the excellent JavaScript library jQuery in future releases of their main development tool, Visual Studio. Best of all, MS says they won’t fix what ain’t broke — jQuery (and its documentation) will be included 100% as-is, with no modifications and with the MIT open source license intact, and intellisense will be fully functional with it. Any proposed changes, enhancements, or bug-fixes will be submitted to the jQuery team, just like everyone else does. Even more incredibly, later this year jQuery will be supported 24×7 by Microsoft’s Product Support Services (PSS) just like any MS product.

This is pretty much gob-smacking news, especially given Microsoft’s open hostility to open source. For those who have sworn like grizzled sailors trying to use the ASP.NET AJAX stuff in something resembling a decent cross-browser fashion, this announcement will no doubt prompt dancing and screams of joy.

jQuery will not be replacing the ASP.NET AJAX libraries but augmenting them, and moving forward the VS crew will be using jQuery to “implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit” and other such like. The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. Fortunately, since jQuery is so well architected it already plays very nice with the existing ASP.NET AJAX gizmos.

Updating the jQuery library will reportedly be as simple plopping the new one over the old, though as always you may need to tweak your code slightly or write a compatibility module or something.

Don’t pinch me, I don’t wanna wake up.

Here’s some relevant linkage, lest you think I’m smoking crack:

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