I’ve posted Part 1 of a 2 part series of jQuery articles today. You can read the article here:

Introduction to jQuery (Part 1: The Client Side)

You can leave any questions or comments below. Part 2 which covers the server side integration with ASP.NET should follow in a week or so.

Microsoft Announces jQuery Integration for ASP.NET

As most of you have probably seen by now, Scott Guthrie today  announced that the jQuery JavaScript library will be shipped as part of forthcoming VS.NET and ASP.NET versions and components.

This doesn’t change anything drastically for those of us who’ve been using and loving jQuery for some time now, but it does legitimize jQuery in the ASP.NET platform. Even though jQuery has been widely used there still has been some resistance to using it either standalone or in combination with ASP.NET because it isn’t part of the Microsoft platform. Going forward Microsoft will ship  raw versions of jQuery, but annotated with Intellisense comments (you can do this yourself today too) , which is a great help especially when you’re picking up jQuery for the first time.

This move provides jQuery’s functionality to the Microsoft AJAX platform so the utility of that platform has just improved drastically. From Scott’s post it sounds like  this also means that jQuery won’t just ship with future versions of ASP.NET and ASP.NET add-ons like MVC, but will be actively integrated with these tools by utilizing jQuery internally.

This is great news, which came as a big, but very pleasant surprise for me when I read it earlier today.

I also think this is a smart move by Microsoft given the incredible utility of jQuery. Rather than having to duplicate jQuery’s functionality as part of Microsoft AJAX 4.0, the tools can now utilize what many of us already know as a tight and very effective library in a small package.It’s also a smart PR move given how many people have migrated to using jQuery INSTEAD of the ASP.NET Ajax platfom. This move might help bring people back into the fold although it’ll still be a tough sell especially if the platform doesn’t slim down a bit or at least componentize a bit better. I also suspect that using jQuery internally will make it much easier to build ASP.NET Ajax applications and hopefully for ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 this might mean a leaner platform – but for that we’ll just have to wait and see what Microsoft does with it.

Either way I think this is great news.

Part 1 of 2 jQuery Articles published

Anyway, just as luck has it I just finished up Part 1 of my jQuery Tutorial articles a few days ago. I’d been meaning to hold off with it until Part 2 is done,  but the timing is just too good to pass up. :-} Part 1 of the article is mostly a pure jQuery introduction and doesn’t talk about jQuery’s Ajax features or direct interaction with the server side and ASP.NET. Rather it focuses purely on many of the extremely useful client side features as well as the basic concepts of extending jQuery with plugins.

Part 2 then will talk about the server side integration with ASP.NET using various mechanisms to call ASP.NET content from raw page Ajax calls, to JSON Service callbacks, to using templating and even partial rendering against server side ASP.NET application. I’ll also talk about building ASP.NET components that integrate with jQuery. This article is based on my jQuery session that I’ve been giving at various conferences and user groups. BTW, if you’re coming to DevConnections in Vegas in November I’ll be there presenting on jQuery there as well so if you’re going I hope to see you there.

Part 2 is mostly done hopefully should go live  over the next couple of weeks – keep an eye on this blog.

Enjoy.