This is absolutely amazing. If you’ve never used jQuery definitely check it out. Ever since James Johnson (president of the Inland Empire .Net User’s Group) did a presentation on it last year I’ve been hooked. It’s is an outstanding JavaScript framework that actuallly makes JavaScript a pleasure to use.
As a classically trained developer I’ve always approached JavaScript as a tool to use only when absolutely necessary and as a last resort. Dealing with cross browser compatibility and just plain frustration over the language has made JavaScript a tool of evil in my development toolbelt.
With jQuery I not only now consider JavaScript a valuable asset I actually love to develop in it.
Hearing that Microsoft is now including it in their IDE is pretty exciting. This means that IntelliSense and debugging (while possible with some great workarounds from the jQuery community) will most likely eventually be fully supported for jQuery. I’ve worked with lots of development environments and Visual Studio is by far one of the best IDE’s around.
Probably even more exciting is that this furthers the strategy that MS is really interested in working with developers. Some of my friends are probably tired of me bashing the old-school “Microsoft Way”. Seeing the real encouragement of MS through employees like Scott Gu, Phil Haack and others on projects like MVC and such really make it apparent that MS is offering alternatives for developers who want the ability to code using modern standards.
Actually integrating jQuery into Visual Studio shows that MS is willing to offer alternatives to their own prodcuts such as the ASP.Net AJAX JavaScript framework. MS is no longer in the “We’re Microsoft. Our way or the highway” mentality.