Lazycoder

Visual Studio shipping with jQuery

jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu's Blog: ""

Wow. This is an interesting development. Visual Studio is going to ship jQuery in a service pack and in future versions of Visual Studio. There will be intellisense support, PSS support, and Microsoft will be submitting patches back to the jQuery library.

This raises an interesting issue. Why does Microsoft need to support 2 different JavaScript libraries? They already have the MS Ajax client library, which does a great job of providing cross-browser support. There's almost nothing that MS Ajax can do that jQuery can't do either with a plugin or using only the core jQuery engine. Why specifically jQuery? Why not Prototype or ExtJS or YUI? Heck, they almost BOUGHT YUI.

One other interesting question: How will companies who are normally allergic to OSS code react to this if their developers start using jQuery when writing their applications?

In any case, this is a big step forward for Microsoft and OSS in general. Hopefully we'll start to see Microsoft shipping more and more OSS software with their developer tools and maybe Windows someday.