Republished with Permission - Original Article

The jQuery library has a passionate community of developers, and it is now the most widely used JavaScript library on the web today.

Two years ago I announced that Microsoft would begin offering product support for jQuery, and that we’d be including it in new versions of Visual Studio going forward. By default, when you create new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects with VS 2010, the core jQuery library is now automatically added to your project.

Earlier this year at the MIX 2010 conference I announced that Microsoft would also begin contributing code to the jQuery project.  During one of my keynotes, John Resig -- the creator of the jQuery library – joined me on stage and talked a little about our participation and discussed an early prototype of a new client templating API for jQuery. 

I later blogged more details about the jQuery Templates plugin, jQuery Data Link plugin, and jQuery Globalization plugin that the ASP.NET team has been working on in conjunction with the jQuery team and jQuery community. We’ve had a lot of requests from ASP.NET customers looking to enable this type of functionality. We followed the standard jQuery open source model and posted prototypes of the plugins to Github.com, participated in the jQuery forums, and incorporated design feedback from the community.