Indeed, the jQuery team still has complete control of the project and will continue to drive it based upon feedback from all our users, Resig said. "We're quite excited that Microsoft and Nokia have decided to become active parts of the community," he added.

Resig said both Microsoft and developers will begin to help contribute back to the jQuery project by proposing patches, submitting test cases and providing comprehensive testing against their run-times. "As with any contribution that comes into the jQuery project, it’ll be closely analyzed, reviewed, and accepted or rejected, based upon its merits, by the jQuery development team -- no free ride will be given," Resig blogged.

"A significant level of testing will be added to the project in this respect," he said. "The jQuery test suite is already integrated into the test suites of Mozilla and Opera, and this move will see a significant level of extra testing being done on Internet Explorer and WebKit - above and beyond what is already done by the jQuery team."

In his post, Hanselman showed a demonstration integrating jQuery with ASP.NET AJAX (including the new client templating engine) as well as ADO.NET Data Services -- which shipped in .NET 3.5 SP1 and was previously code-named Astoria.

Regarding Nokia, Resig said:

"Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web run-time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the Web run-time.

"To start, Nokia will be moving a number of their applications to work on the run-time (such as Maps) and building them using jQuery. jQuery will become part of their widget development platform, meaning that any developer will be able to use jQuery in the construction of widgets for Nokia phones."