Start using jQuery in your Asp.Net apps!

If you were waiting for this to be incorporated into Asp.Net AJAX, you have no more excuses.  Scott Guthrie today announced in his blog that Microsoft will ship jQuery support with Visual Studio, and they will provide a vanilla and "intellisense-annotated versions,"  allowing for complete cooperation with the usage of the package.

This is a great feature to see supported, but it also another awesome indication of Microsoft's growing support for open source products. 

I have to believe that Scott Guthry is driving this forward, at least with the Asp.Net group, and I can't wait to see what kinds of integration people can come up with in terms of building intermingled jQuery code and Asp.Net Ajax controls and extenders.

Along with that, I want to pass on a link to a set of jQuery best-practices that I thought was pretty good usage tips, but also highlighted a direct change to how I have personally been coding for quite a while.

Normally, with JavaScript, we tend to declare our client event binding directly in the markup - usually as a by-product of attributes such as OnClientClick and things of that nature,

But if read the best practices for jQuery, it demonstrates how to very easily add a client event from JavaScript code - making the client-side code much easier to work with and also falling closer into line with how I like to bind server events.

Summing up - I believe jQuery use is about to explode on the Asp.Net development scene, and non too soon!

-joel