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jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: 
As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: 
[Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: 
and with a chained command: 
The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner with the jQuery team on this. jQuery is a fantastic library, and something we think can really benefit ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX developers. We are looking forward to having it work great with Visual Studio and ASP.NET, and to help bring it to an even larger set of developers. For more details on today's announcement, please check out John Resig's post on the jQuery team blog. Scott Hanselman is also about to post a nice tutorial that shows off integrating jQuery with ASP.NET AJAX (including the new client templating engine) as well as ADO.NET Data Services (which shipped in .NET 3.5 SP1 and was previously code-named "Astoria"). Hope this helps, Scott 
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One of the great new features of VS 2008 is its support for framework multi-targeting. This enables you to use VS 2008 on .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 projects, and does not require you to upgrade your projects to the latest version of the .NET Framework in order to take advantage of new Visual Studio 2008 features (like JavaScript Intellisense, JavaScript Debugging, code editing, nested master pages, and the improved web designer and CSS features - all of which work with .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 projects). ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Multi-Targeting Support VS 2008 out of the box allows you to open and edit existing ASP.NET 2.0 applications built with the separate ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 download we shipped last year. The VS 2008 multi-targeting support works just fine with these projects, and you can use the improved JavaScript and web designer support with them - while still targeting .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. New ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Project Templates for VS 2008 Out of the box VS 2008 doesn't include project templates for creating brand new ASP.NET 2.0 with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications. Right before Christmas we shipped a web free web download for VS 2008 that enables these project templates options. You can download them here (note: you also need to make sure you have ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 installed on your machine in order to use them). Once these additional project templates are installed, you can use File->New Project or File->New Web Site within VS 2008 to create ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications that run on ASP.NET 2.0: New ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Web Site: 
New ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Web Application: 
Applications built using these project templates do not require .NET 3.5 to be installed on a server in order to work - you can copy them to any existing web server that has .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 installed and they will work fine. Hope this helps, Scott 
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This week my team released updates of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as the Visual Studio Web Deployment project packager. Both of these updates are designed to work with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a free download and contains more than 40 additional AJAX controls and components that work on top of the core ASP.NET AJAX functionality now built-into .NET 3.5 (and available as a separate download for ASP.NET 2.0). In addition to having Microsoft developers contribute, the project also has dozens of non-Microsoft contributors adding great features and controls. The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit update shipped this week fixes some issues that people were running into when using the control toolkit's extender controls with the VS 2008 Web designer. The only change made was to adjust the version string number of the control toolkit assemblies (David Anson has more details of the change here). I'd definitely recommend downloading the update if you are using VS 2008 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. You can also find a steady stream of articles about ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit via my Link Listing series (in particular check my post here for a dedicated ASP.NET AJAX link post). Also read my previous post on using ASP.NET AJAX Control Extenders in VS 2008 to learn more about the integrated design-time support that you now get with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit in VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. Lastly, check out the great ASP.NET AJAX videos on the www.asp.net site here and here. 
Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Project Support Late last night my team also posted the VS 2008 Web Deployment project download option for VS 2008. Web Deployment projects can be used with either the "Web Site" or "Web Application Project" options built-into VS 2008, and provide a few additional build, packaging and deployment options for you to use. You can read an old tutorial post of mine here to learn more about they work. This week's VS 2008 Web Deployment Project download supports all of the existing features provided by the VS 2005 web deployment download. It also adds additional support for: - Easily migrating VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects to VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects
- Replacing output only if web deployment builds succeed
- IIS7 Support
You can learn more about this week's download here and download it directly here. We are calling this week's download the "December CTP" so that we can incorporate feedback on the new features. We are then going to ship the final release on the web next month. Hope this helps, Scott 
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. Visual Studio ASP.NET -
Debugging Script: Dumping out ASP.NET Session Contents: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET support team has an excellent post that details how to use the windbg debugger to dump out real-time information about the current state within the ASP.NET in-process session store (# of sessions, what their current timeout is, and the memory size of the objects within each session). She has a great script you can just run "as-is" in this article, as well as an in-depth discussion about how it works. Very useful if you are ever trying to figure out why your application is consuming a lot of memory, and suspect it might be session state related. -
Facebook.NET: Earlier this summer Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team posted a really cool framework for developing ASP.NET based Facebook applications. You can learn more about it from his blog post here, and download it from his CodePlex project here. Steve Trefethen last week posted a VS starter kit for Facebook.NET which makes it even easier to get started. ASP.NET AJAX Silverlight -
Halo 3 Game Guide: Halo 3 ships this week, and no doubt many people will find themselves afflicted with a sudden illness that requires them to stay home one day this week. To help get you ready, watch one of the High Definition Halo3 Videos here (for a lower resolution video click here), and browse the Halo3 Game Guide here. Both are built with Silverlight 1.0. WPF and Expression Blend Hope this helps, Scott 
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Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET - Debugging Script: Dumping out Current and Recent ASP.NET Requests: Tess Ferrandez from the ASP.NET support team has an excellent post that details how to use the windbg debugger to dump out real-time information about what requests ASP.NET is currently processing on the server (super useful when investigating failures). She has a great script you can just run "as-is" in this article, as well as an in-depth discussion about how it works.
- Freezing GridView Column Headers with CSS and a Control Adapter: Matt Berseth has a cool article on how you can use CSS to implement a "frozen columns headers" feature with the standard <asp:gridview> control. Note that this type of scenario is much easier with the new <asp:listview> control in .NET 3.5, which enables you to customize all of the html markup emitted.
ASP.NET AJAX - Update for the iPhone: Matt Gibbs blogs about a fix you can apply to ASP.NET AJAX to address a change in the iPhone 1.01 patch that impacts how regular expressions are parsed in the iPhone Safari browser. Matt's fix enables you to continue targeting iPhone users with your ASP.NET AJAX applications.
Visual Studio - XML to Schema Inference Wizard for Visual Studio 2008: Scott Hanselman has a great blog post about a new item template wizard that makes it really easy to automatically infer an XML schema from a XML file or XML snippet. He then shows how you can use the cool new LINQ to XML features in VB9 to get automatic LINQ to XML intellisense inside VS 2008 with it.
IIS 7.0 Silverlight - Ink Recognition and Silverlight: Loren has a really cool sample built with Silverlight that demonstrates how you can use the ink pen recognition support within Silverlight to enable tablet or mouse based Google searches using a Silverlight application. A very cool mashup.
- Silverlight Spy Tool: Silverlight Spy is a small WinForms application capable of inspecting Silverlight 1.0 applications. You can use it to navigate a XAML object explorer of a running Silverlight application, trace out messages from it, and enable easier debugging of it.
- HtmlTextBlock control for Silverlight: David Anson has published a really cool control for Silverlight 1.1 that provides an easy way to take HTML input and display it using the text/graphics stack within Silverlight.
- Silverlight Dev Camp Chicago: Kevin Marshall is organizing an upcoming Silverlight DevCamp event in Chicago on September 28th-29th. You can attend completely for free.
Hope this helps, Scott 
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Last week the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released Build 10618 of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. This fixed a few issues discovered with the release earlier this month including: - A fix for the Tabs naming container
- A fix for a VS design-time dependency
- FilteredTextBox Navigation and control key issues
This build also contains additional performance optimizations for the new "script combining" feature provided by the new ToolkitScriptManager control. This feature can help significantly improve performance for pages with multiple AJAX scripts that previously needed to be downloaded separately. David Anson has a nice blog post that talks about these improvements here. New ASP.NET AJAX Videos Joe Stagner has recently posted five new (free) ASP.NET AJAX videos on www.asp.net: 
You can download and watch the videos here. These new videos are available to download in a variety of video and audio formats including: WMV, Zune, iPod, PSP, MPEG-4, and 3GP. New ASP.NET AJAX Articles Here are a few recent ASP.NET AJAX articles you might also want to check out: - ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel Tips and Tricks: This is a great MSDN Magazine article by Jeff Prosise that covers: update highlighting, how to cancel updatepanel updates, optimizing with conditional updatepanels, and using page methods.
- AJAX Control Toolkit Patch Utility: If you are not an official contributor to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit project, but would like to submit a bug fix or small feature into the toolkit, you can read this article to learn how to create and submit a patch to the team for them to review and potentially include.
ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Books As I've mentioned in other recent posts, the first books specifically targeting the final ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release were recently published. Below are links to two of them that are shipping today:  
Both books also include a chapter on using the controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Hope this helps, Scott 
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Occasionally I get to do cool non-traditional things as part of my job. Two weeks ago, I was the guest star in a fun "Red vs. Blue" Halo video produced by Rooster Teeth. You can watch it online here (it is 3 minutes in length). Below is a screen-shot of me in the movie, right after I shoot "Private Donut" the first time (you will have to watch the video to understand). 
I also spend some time in the video trying to explain to the "reds" what ASP.NET AJAX can offer them. <g> ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit Update Released In other ASP.NET AJAX news, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team last week shipped an update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (which is a free, shared source library, containing 34+ ASP.NET AJAX Controls that are built by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers). This ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit update contains a bunch of great new updates: - JavaScript comment/whitespace stripping - When compiled in "Release" mode, all of the JavaScript files in the Toolkit now automatically have all comments and unnecessary whitespace removed. This can reduce the download size of the scripts by over 50%. This is implemented as an automated MSBuild task that you can take and use within your own ASP.NET AJAX projects to streamline your custom JavaScript sizes as well (I'll blog about how to use the MSBuild task in the next few days).
- Localization support - The Toolkit now has an infrastructure for localizing the text in JavaScript files using the standard ASP.NET AJAX support for resource files. There are placeholder files for the following 14 languages: Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional).
- ASP.NET Theme/Skin support - You can now use ASP.NET's theme/skin support to specify properties for Toolkit controls across an entire web site in one central location.
You can try out and download the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit online here. Free Microsoft Learning Course: Developing Enhanced Web Experiences with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions Microsoft Learning has published a free premium online clinic that provides a great way to learn how to use ASP.NET AJAX. It can be watched for free and covers AJAX concepts and how to use ASP.NET AJAX end-to-end (it is 2 hours long). You can watch the course online here. More ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos Joe Stagner has been busy creating more ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos (I first blogged about this series in this blog post from last month). He published three new videos last week: For more of Joe's ASP.NET AJAX videos, please check out the ASP.NET AJAX videos section on www.asp.net. Damian Mehers (who implemented the ListSearch ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit control above) has also published a cool video on ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that you can watch here. ASP.NET AJAX Downloads and Deployments In the first 6 weeks since ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 was released, we've already had several hundred thousand downloads of the final V1.0 release. Last week we got back the results from a recent web crawler study on the Internet that found over 60,000 unique Internet sites that had already deployed sites using the final ASP.NET AJAX V1.0 bits within the first month. Click here to see screen-shots of some of these sites, and read interviews with the developers who built them. Hope this helps, Scott 
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I am moving to a new house this week, so I unfortunately didn't get a chance to create any new original content this weekend. But thankfully a few people did forward me some good links that I haven't seen pointed to elsewhere that I highly recommend checking out:
Free ASP.NET AJAX Hands-On Tutorials Sascha Corti from Microsoft Switzerland helped produce some really nice ASP.NET AJAX hands-on tutorials in German and French, and Ken Cox (a great ASP.NET MVP from Canada) did an awesome job translating them to English. You can download these labs and walkthrough them yourselves for free here. Note that the documentation .zip file is 8MB (it contains lots of step by step pictures) - so I recommend using the "Save As" option in your browser and store them locally to disk as opposed to trying to open them directly. Also - in case you missed it, also make sure to check out the great free ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Videos here.
Cool ASP.NET Disk Output Cache and RSS Toolkit CodePlex Projects Dmitry, who used to be the ASP.NET Dev Manager and who now runs the Dynamic Language group within my team, created a number of really cool ASP.NET projects early last year. Over the last few months Dmitry has worked with members of the .NET community to create CodePlex projects for some of these free components, which will anyone to join in enhancing them and adding new features. Below are pointers to two recent CodePlex groups: - ASP.NET RSS Toolkit: This toolkit provides a ton of great support for efficiently consuming RSS feeds from a remote server (including automatic caching of them, as well as a RssDataSource control to enable easy databinding to feeds), and also support easily generating RSS feeds of your own. My past RSS Toolkit Tip./Trick tutorial shows just some of the cool things you can do with it. This CodePlex project is now being run by Marc Brooks.
Free Podcasts with Me Two podcasts that were recorded two weeks ago while I was in the UK at the excellent WebDD conference have recently been published. You can listen to both for free: - NxtGenUG podcast -- NxtGenUG is a free .NET usergroup that meets regularly in Birmingham, Coventry, and Oxford. You can learn more about them, as well as their upcoming free conference on May 23rd in Reading here.
Hope this helps, Scott P.S. And now I have to go back to carrying boxes....<g> 
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Joe Stagner on the ASP.NET team has been busy the last few weeks, and has just finished updating all 23 of his ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos to go against the final ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release. If you haven't watched Joe's videos before, I highly recommend checking them out. They are short, focused, videos that drill in on a specific topic and are designed to help master common scenarios when using the product. Both VB and C# sample code versions can be downloaded for each video topic. You can watch all of the videos online for free at: http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/ (also make sure to check out the more than 50+ other videos on that page as well). 
Now that Joe has finished covering a lot of the ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit basics, he is starting on a new "ASP.NET AJAX Patterns" series that will go deeper and discuss broader patterns to think about with AJAX (for example: predictive fetching, content chunking, page rearrangement, etc). Make sure to subscribe to the ASP.NET Videos RSS Feed to keep an eye on this series as future videos are released. ASP.NET AJAX in Action Book Alessandro "Garbin" Gallo, David Barkol, and Rama Krishna Vavilala have also been working on what is shaping up to be a great ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 book for Manning called "ASP.NET AJAX in Action": 
Early chapters are now available online via their early access program. Click here to learn more and start reading it today. Hope this helps, Scott 
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As I mentioned last week when ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 shipped, we are publishing the full source code to the ASP.NET AJAX product. This includes the source to the server-side ASP.NET integration (including the UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, and ScriptManager controls, as well as the source to the Network Serialization code). The client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library (which we also call the "Microsoft AJAX Library") is being released under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL). This grants developers the right to freely customize/modify the library, as well as to redistribute the derivative versions of the JavaScript library for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. The code for the server-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 implementation was released this morning. You can download it here. It is being released under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). Included with the source code are debugger symbols for the shipped binary, which will allow you to step from your own code into the ASP. NET AJAX library while debugging, with line number and symbol data preserved. Note that the setup installs the source code locally on your machine within the "\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\v1.0.61025\Source" directory. You can also obviously download (and modify) the source code for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. It is built as a collaborative CodePlex Project that both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers contribute code and work on together. Thanks, Scott P.S. I'm hoping on a plane to Europe in an hour for my presentations in Belgium and the UK, and will be out the rest of this week (it only took me 3 frantic hours to find my passport last night -- sheesh). As a result there will be some delays with blog comments (and my responses to them) while I'm away. 
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The Atlanta C# User Group is meeting on Monday, August 7, 2006, at 6:00 pm at the Microsoft offices in Alpharetta. Greg Young will present the design patterns of the month, followed by Wally McClure presenting on Ajax and Atlas. See you there.
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