I have been a huge fan of jQuery ever since I started working on IdeaPipe about 10 months ago. Mostly because of its simplistic DOM access using standard CSS syntax that we all have to learn anyways in the modern Web 2.0 world. In addition to the ease of finding elements on your page, it also works very nicely with other frameworks, I have used it in combination with Microsoft AJAX, Google's GData JavaScript, and TinyMCE.
Personally I found this to be amazing news, because Microsoft is shipping an Open Source project, licensed under MIT License, with its flag ship developer tool, Visual Studio. Maybe if we play our cards right, we can start seeing other projects like NUnit and Moq start to ship with Visual Studio. I have my fingers crossed.
John Resig the developer of jQuery had this to say on his blog:
Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).
And according to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft is also extending the standard product support to jQuery:
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.
This is probably some of the most exciting, because it means that jQuery will be a supported stack in some of the more rigid enterprise development environments that won't install anything that isn't supported by Microsoft. I also beleive this is great news for MVC, because jQuery makes MVC just that much more useful for the average developer.