MS + jQuery: This Is Huge!

Yesterday, the ASP.NET team announced that they were going to ship jQuery, a small, populate open source web client library. And not only is Microsoft going to ship this library, as is, but we're going to build support into Visual Studio for it, build future versions of our web components assuming it and support it via PSS like any other Microsoft product.

This is huge.

Of course, is it useful for developers using Microsoft tools, because they get another supported library out of the box for them to use to build their applications. But that's not what makes it huge.

What makes it huge is that, instead of seeing the functionality in jQuery and thinking to themselves, "Wow. jQuery is really great. Let's build something from scratch like that into our products," the ASP.NET team, in what is the first time in Microsoft history afaik, decided to reuse something from the world that was already working, adding only the thing we do better than anyone else: integration into a suite of libraries and tools.

"But isn't this just 'embrace and extend?'" I hear you asking. "Isn't Microsoft just going to absorb jQuery, thereby killing it for folks not using Microsoft products?"

There are two ways forward at this point. One, we could push on jQuery in a Microsoft-centric way until the project "owners" (which is a slippery concept with an OSS project anyway), decide to either give up and let Microsoft "own" it or they decide to fork jQuery, thereby creating jQuery-classic and jQuery-MS. This would not be good for the jQuery community.

The other way to go, and this is the way I hope it goes, is that Microsoft learns to play nicely in this world, submitting features, changes and bug fixes to the jQuery source tree in a way that's consistent with the vision from which jQuery sprang, making it work better for Microsoft customers and non-Microsoft customers alike.

If we can learn to do that second thing, then we've turned a corner at Microsoft. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I think you mean "popular" instead of "populate". But this is significant news...though I wonder why jQuery is special here and not Drupal or other frameworks? I thought the whole JS Intellisense stuff was supposed to work with any lib?

Your missing an important point here -- jQuery's famous plugin system. Optional extensions are trivial to write & integrate into jQuery. Hence MS can "extend" jQuery all it wants to benefit ASP.NET / MVC developers, while not affecting the core jQuery at all. A win-win situation.

I was skeptical when MS embraced XML, thinking they had plans to make it proprietary. I was wrong. They also seem respectfully tolerant of the Mac.

Off the subject, Silverlight imo is also gonna be Huge. Flash is engrained, but to do any serious development, the whole .NET framework is available to ya (all of it you need, anyway), not to mention a greatdevelopment environment (VS) and an up-and-coming design env in Expression Blend. Good times.