Check it out - a blog post from Scott indicates that .NET, and Visual Studio, will support jQuery!

Scott says

“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.”

This is exciting news for developers, as jQuery will help fill the noticable gap in ASP.NET to be truly client rich. I know things I’d like to do, such as supporting dragging and dropping of elements in a grid (a la Netflix queue), are not possible with the out-of-the-box version of Studio / ASP.NET.

I’ve played with ASP.NET AJAX, but found the performance to suck, and the component set to be ugly and difficult to style. At work, we use a popular third party component set called Infragistics, and their components do perform well, but they are not free. I’m excited to hear about jQuery support because I think it will really open up the playing field for those who can’t afford third-party component sets.

Do you use jQuery? What do you think of it? Does it perform well? Do you think it will take off for the .NET world?