In big news for its developer division and a huge nod to its burgeoning support for open-source software, Microsoft has announced its plans to support the jQuery open-source JavaScript library.

Not only will Microsoft support the jQuery library, but the software giant also plans to ship it as part of its Visual Studio tool set at some point, company officials said. Microsoft announced the news on Sept. 28.

The move to support jQuery comes less than a month before the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, which will be held in October in Los Angeles, and bodes well in terms of what kind of news we might be able to expect at the PDC.

jQuery is a lightweight open-source JavaScript library that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the Web, said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president, in a blog announcing Microsoft's support of jQuery. John Resig, the creator of jQuery, who also is a chief evangelist at Mozilla, said Microsoft joins a long list of jQuery users, including Google, Intel, IBM, Intuit and Reuters. Resig also announced that Nokia, too, has adopted jQuery as of Sept. 28.

Resig, who is received with rock star status at open-source conferences, said in a blog post:

"Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. Not only will they be using it for their corporate development but they will be providing it as a core piece of their platform for developers to build with."

Moreover, Resig said:

"Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework, and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples and documentation).

Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications. jQuery helpers will also be included in the server-side portion of .NET development (in addition to the existing helpers) providing complementary functions to existing ASP.NET AJAX capabilities."

As part of his discussion as to why Microsoft sought out jQuery, Guthrie said in a blog post:

"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."