Though jQuery has been popular with Web application developers for two years, Microsoft until now has not given it full support. Now, with the help of IntelliSense, writing jQuery code in Visual Studio just got a lot easier.jQuery is an open-source JavaScript library that simplifies the coding and
manipulation of HTML elements on a Web page. Without jQuery, developers can
still access all the elements in the Document Object Model, but jQuery makes it
much quicker and easier.
jQuery initially was created in early 2006, and has become popular with Web
developers. On the other hand, for many years, Visual Studio has been extremely
popular with ASP.NET developers, but was
limited in its handling of JavaScript in general, with little or no support for
third-party JavaScript libraries. This is probably because early versions of
ASP.NET primarily focused on server-side
development.
In fact, although Microsoft never explicitly discouraged client-side
development with JavaScript in conjunction with ASP.NET,
the company tried to control JavaScript coding by forcing developers to go
through a cumbersome set of APIs to generate JavaScript code. (Interestingly,
this set of APIs was a precursor to ASP.NET's
support for AJAX.)
Click here for an eWEEK Labs walk-through of using jQuery in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.
That has changed with Visual Studio 2008, released Nov. 19, 2007, as Microsoft has
added significant support for JavaScript to its Visual Studio platform. Still,
until recently, Visual Studio had no knowledge or understanding of third-party
libraries, even though most client-side Web development is now done with the
help of such third-party libraries.
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