Today was a great day for developers and designers alike as John Resig & Scott Guthrie announced Micosoft adopting jQuery as a standard for JavaScript libraries in Visual Studio! MS plans to ship the library with future releases of Visual Studio and will be supporting the cool new IntelliSense for JavaScript in there incredibly usefull IDE. We have long been pairing ASP.NET and jQuery as you know with RIAnimation and RichUI, but are so glad to see Micosoft get our backs on the concept. This is awesome news and will hlp us move our two FREE project forward faster. It is really refreshing to see Microsoft is breaking thir mold lately with "outside-the-box" ideas like ASP.NET MVC, Enity Framework, and this latest jQuery endeavor! Kudos to you Microsoft and congrats to John and the jQuery team for getting reckognized by the biggest name in the web for your work.

Following all this buzz about jQuery we will be dropping the official V1 release of RIAnimation with insane performance and design time enhancements. It has ben completely ported to the new jQuery UI Effects library and has some awesome new animations in it. I bet there are some developers out there who can't wait to make their GridViews "explode", literally!

We are just adding desig time support to our first round of RichUI controls and then thy will be dropping as an Alpha project. RichUI is ASP.NET controls that render as jQuery widgets and are completely client-side interaction. This is an awesome set of controls for all you MVC guys out there and has some really nice interaction for all you RIA designers! Some of the controls are: Accordion, Tabs, SplitLayout, RichPanel, and more... Microsoft's Scott Hanselman mentioned they plan to add controls to ASP.NET framework that are based on the jQuery widgets, I wonder if they sould just save the time and use RichUI? It sounds like they are planning exactly what we are doing and almost finished with! For anyone who can't wait, here is a very early Demo of RichUI (ASP.NET jQuery controls).