Last week, Microsoft released Rich IntelliSense for jQuery for Visual Studio 2008. This will also work for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. This comes a month after the anouncement that jQuery will be shipping with future releases of VS 2008, making jQuery the official JavaScript framework for developing .NET AJAX applications.

For .NET UI developers, this news should be pretty welcome. With .NET AJAX and jQuery, front end developers can build .NET applications without the need for .NET Page Controls and can use jQuery's AJAX API to communicate to the back end of the application, be it WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) or Web Services.

jQuery is one of the best light weight JavaScript frameworks for decreasing the size and complexity of your JavaScript. Along with Prototype, it has become a great option for developers looking to build their own components in friendly HTML and clean CSS.

jQuery is a great option for building HTML based RIAs, as the jQuery User Interface Library add on is also relatively light and very powerful.

I've been a UI Engineer on a team working on a .NET AJAX application for the last several months and have found coding friendly HTML and clean CSS is one of the keys to our success. We have almost exclusively used HTML for the project and have only used .NET Page controls on a few occasions.

jQuery is a great framework for CSS developers as the CSS Selector is a very important part of jQuery.

I'm going to spend the next few weeks looking into moving an ASP.NET AJAX site built using the Prototype JavaScript framework and Scriptaculous library to jQuery and jQuery UI. In future posts I'll talk about the experience, both the successes and failures.

Read more from Jeremy Bierly.