Telerik beats Microsoft to the jQuery punch (barely)

Microsoft let loose some big news on Sunday: in a few weeks time, they will officially be shipping the popular jQuery JavaScript library with Visual Studio! Being a long time user and fan of jQuery, I personally found his announcement very exciting. If you've never used jQuery, you've been missing out. It was the first JavaScript library I used that actually made JavaScript programming fun (an adjective not usually associated with the world's "favorite" scripting language). jQuery makes simple JavaScript animation, DOM querying, CSS manipulation, and so much more so easy and very intuitive. Point: jQuery is great. Microsoft's decision to ship jQuery will not directly affect the framework (MS is not changing or "enhancing" the library), but the attention will definitely help drive jQuery's popularity and in turn its online support. For Microsoft's part, they will be shipping free Visual Studio IntelliSense providers for jQuery in "a few weeks" and then providing "official" Microsoft product support for jQuery later this year. And while the Microsoft announcement is great, Telerik has got even better news! Before Microsoft ever indicated that they would be making this move, Telerik began showing-off jQuery integration with the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. Our developers, like Microsoft's, recognized the power of this compact framework and its ability to easily enhance the RadControls. In fact, on Friday (days before the MS announcement) our own .NET Ninja Vladimir Enchev showed you how you can use jQuery to add some neat animations to RadGrid. Imagine our surprise when days later Microsoft made their jQuery announcement! Are our offices bugged?! Either way, we're thrilled Microsoft has officially decided to support jQuery, too, and we're happy to be leading the way for Microsoft and the rest of the ASP.NET AJAX component world. Stay tuned for more details as Q3 draws near!