Microsoft ships jQuery as a standard part of the ASP.NET MVC framework, and also adds it by default to new ASP.NET Web Forms projects created with Visual Studio 2010.

With today’s preview we are making it easy to integrate jQuery and Microsoft Ajax controls, and enable developers using jQuery to use the Microsoft Ajax controls with a familiar jQuery plug-in API syntax.  Specifically, we are now exposing all Microsoft Ajax controls as jQuery plug-ins automatically. In other words, when you add jQuery to a page, you can use Microsoft Ajax controls just like jQuery plug-ins.

For example, the following script demonstrates how you can use jQuery to create a DataView that displays data from a WCF service (using a jQuery plugin like code syntax):

Figure 9

Notice above that I’m loading jQuery by calling the Sys.require() client-side loader API. You can load jQuery using the new client script loader, or alternatively you can just include the jQuery library in the page using a standard <script> tag.

Once jQuery is added to the page, Microsoft Ajax Library controls are automatically exposed as jQuery plug-ins.  This means you can create and attach Microsoft Ajax controls using a standard jQuery plugin syntax (like above), and fully integrate with the jQuery selector syntax.