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John Resig has a post up this morning discussing the integration of the jQuery JavaScript library into Visual Studio 2008.

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.

The library will ship unchanged with VS2008, will have full intellisense support, will be supported by Microsoft’s Product Support Services (PSS) and licensed via the existing MIT license.

Matt Asay sees this as a big step for us;

Microsoft is too big and too important a company to have ignored the missing ingredient in its open-source strategy: contribution back to existing communities. Open source can be a fantastic complement to Microsoft’s existing products and to its businesses. Open source is a tool. It’s a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Did Microsoft finally join the open-source community? It looks like it from here.

You’ll find much more detail on Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman’s blogs.