I much like every other developer has cursed Microsoft for bringing the ever, non-standards compliant Internet Explorer Browser suite to the world. Fortunately the pain of dealing with Microsodt based browsers has lessened but some pain at times is undeniable.

When Microsoft first included jQuery as part of its .Net framework stack with Visual Studio and ASP MVC as of version x it was a move that was essentially unavoidable. Their own platformwasn’t as robust and jQuery and the ease, as well as rate it was growing was eating the competition like Scriptaculous, and Mootools alive.

During the last MIX conference (another with a strange acronym name like SWSX) in Las Vegas Microsoft announced along with jQuery creator John Resig that Microsoft shall be working with the core jQuery development team on mainiting and enhancing the growth of library to increase development and enhance features.

One of the other things that they will be working on is a new templating engine for jQuery, which should be interesting to see, as Microsoft have already submitted a proposal for a plugin to be reviewed.

jQuery has a lot of allure such as its ability to easily integrate with a number of languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, VB, Java, its simplicity, flexibility and open source MIT and GNU GPL Version 2 licenses, so you can not help by being at least a bit suspicious when Microsoft enters the game in such a big way.

I guess the only thing to do is wait and see, but i Microsoft isnt the best known advocate and active participant in the Open Source arena. Granted some may point to instances like this, but on the whole any activity in Open Source is often up for scrutiny.

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