It's official. jQuery has become the new de facto standard for the web development community. By rolling jQuery in with Visual Studio and the ASP.NET core tools pipeline, a whole new precedent has been set in the software industry.

jQuery was already supported in many major IDEs, including Aptana Studio (which is built on Eclipse), but usually only sharing with other frameworks like prototype. But there are two IDEs that have pretty much ruled the software industry for the last several years: Visual Studio and Eclipse. Neither one has chosen any particular "favorite" Javascript open source framework. You usually get a bundle of different frameworks being supported or nothing at all (import something yourself or roll your own).

But Microsoft's decision to adopt a third party software framework, bundle it, and make it a foundational component of its own, is an earth-shaking paradigm shift. This is something that will turn the software industry on its head. There is a whole industry carved out from the trenches that Microsoft dug. Giving a third party framework the honor of being placed into the middle of it all and running half the show, so to speak, is absolutely breathtaking, a moment to be awed. Right now everyone should take a moment and let their mouths gape because this is just short of bizzare.

And I mean that with no pretentions. I'm not saying that "this is unlike Microsoft", although it is, because there really is no precedent for this. The only precedents I can think of have been support for open standards--support for HTML (Internet Explorer), HTTP, FTP (bundled in Explorer), the TCP/IP stack, OpenGL, keyboard/mouse standardization, compact disc file system support, and standard driver support. But all of those things have traditionally always had, with very few exceptions, a proprietary implementation of software of Microsoft's own making or bought out. Most of the exceptions come from third parties such as Intel, who licensed technology, which is not the same as bundling open source code.

jQuery is licensed on the MIT license. Microsoft will be a "normal" participant with the jQuery community just like anyone else; they will introduce ideas, report bugs, and propose bug fixes, but they will go through a QA and approval process just like everyone else.

The closest thing I can think of that even remotely equates to Microsoft getting this involved with and supporting of outsiders in the web community was back in the late 90s, when Microsoft got very involved with the W3C and helped shape the directions of Dynamic HTML and the DOM, not to mention their extensive involvement with the XML and then SOAP initiatives and the insanely detailed UDDI [dis]proving that followed. But once again, those are standards / protocols, not code. So even though Microsoft has done amazing shifts in supporting the open source communities with CodePlex (bravo!), I'm curious if this really is the first time, ever, that Microsoft has done this on behalf of their proprietary development platforms (Visual Studio, ASP.NET).

On a final note, I must say that I absolutely adore jQuery and what it does for web development. jQuery working with Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC and C# 3.0 w/ LINQ are all a match made in heaven. Knowing that Microsoft is going to build on top of jQuery is almost like getting a wonderful new programming language akin to C#, but built for the web. So really, my day just went from being depressed from the last week to being literally overjoyed like I just got engaged to marry someone or something.