But what is perhaps most important about the Microsoft announcement is that not only will Microsoft be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio, but the company will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as is, Guthrie said. The company will not be forking, or changing, the source from the main jQuery branch. And the files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license, Guthrie said.

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, Guthrie said. "The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects," he said.

"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 [Product Support Services]," Guthrie said.

Moreover, "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," Guthrie said. "New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well."

Scott Hanselman, a senior program manager in Microsoft's Developer Division, blogged that the move to support jQuery is "cool because we're using jQuery just as it is. It's Open Source, and we'll use it and ship it via its MIT license, unchanged. If there are changes we want, we'll submit a patch just like anyone else. JQuery will also have full support from PSS (Product Support Services) like any other Microsoft product, starting later this year. Folks have said Microsoft would never include Open Source in the platform, I'm hoping this move is representative of a bright future."

In an interview with eWEEK, Resig said, "One thing to consider, as well: This is the first time that Microsoft will be providing support for a non-Microsoft or an open-source project. They really like the jQuery project and want to make sure that it succeeds."

In addition, Hanselman said:

"Visual Studio 2008 has very nice JavaScript intellisense support that can be made richer by the inclusion of comments for methods in third-party libraries. Today you can search the Web and find intellisense-enabled jQuery files hacked together by the community, but we intend to offer official support for intellisense in jQuery soon."

Despite Microsoft's strong vote of confidence to support jQuery, don't expect to see Resig wind up in Redmond working for the software giant.

"I'll be staying at Mozilla -- this doesn't affect my position there," Resig told eWEEK. "Microsoft will just be using, and supporting, the framework. We won't, explicitly, be lending any assistance -- at least not more so than we do for any of our other users [bug fixes, performance improvements]. By the same token, we will analyze any patches or contributions that we receive from them and deem them worthy of the project, or not."