jQuery is an open-source community-driven JavaScript library that is designed to make DOM traversal, events, animations and AJAX a cross-browser and easy to do. Back in September 2008, Microsoft announced that they would begin supporting jQuery, and distributing it with Visual Studio. At MIX10 earlier this year, they announced that Microsoft would also contribute code to jQuery. Later Scott Guthrie of the developer team at Microsoft wrote about three plugins they were working on in conjunction with the jQuery development team: jQuery Templates, jQuery Data Link, and jQuery Globalization.
jQuery Templates allows developers to format a set of database records retrieved through an AJAX request to the server in an easy way. It is extremely flexible and cleverly takes a lot of the heavy lifting often involved in formatting responses out of the developer’s hands. jQuery Data Link is a higher-level plugin which is designed to help developers keep the contents of an HTML form synchronised with the values in a JavaScript object for easy manipulation. Finally, jQuery Globalization enables different cultural conventions for number parsing, date and time rendering, calendars and currencies, including information for over 350 cultures.
With the launch of Visual Studio 2010, jQuery is automatically included in new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects. Today the plugin contributions are also graduating; the jQuery Project has accepted all three as official jQuery plugins. They are immediatley availabe for download from the jQuery website, the documentation is in the official jQuery docs, and from jQuery 1.5 (the next major release) the jQuery Templates plugin will be made a part of the jQuery core library (jQuery.js).
Find out more about the jQuery plugins from Microsoft and the jQuery project team.
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