JQuery

JQuery is a lightweight Open Javascript library developed first by John Resig. It allows us to easily manipulate HTML elements with minimal lines of code. Microsoft has offered to support JQuery in Visual Studio. It is distributed under MIT and GNU license and is of size 15KB. It is cross-browser compatible.

It was developed to address two pain points in Javascript  – 1.Getting the elements 2. Parsing through DOM structure to get elements every time. JQuery inherited the Selector syntax from CSS to get the elements in easier way. It has the ability to get a set of elements at once and perform operations on that instead of parsing the DOM structure every time as in Javascript. Jquery has support for cool animations. Jquery can also be extended by Jquery Plugins.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 supports intelli-sense for JQuery through this patch. JQuery and JQuery intellisense file can be downloaded from JQuery website. The downloads contains a *.js and *vsdoc.js file. They can be referenced as a script file and JQuery library methods can be made use of. For example, JQuery library supports methods to get JSON text through GET request with full intelli-sense support.  JQuery brings tremendous productivity gains in Client side development.

Check out the tutorial by Rick Strahl and Karl Sequin on how to use JQuery. Check out Stephen Walther’s session on JQuery and ASP.NET at PDC Conference. In future posts, we will see how to use JQuery in ASP.NET Web forms and in ASP.NET MVC and how to use JQuery plugins.