John Resig announced that jQuery 1.3 has been released. jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. The big features of this release are:

• Sizzle - A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine.
• Live Events - Event delegation with a jQuery twist.
• jQuery Event Overhaul - Completely rewired to simplify event handling.
• HTML Injection Rewrite - Lightning-fast HTML appending.
• Offset Rewrite - Super-quick position calculation.
• No More Browser Sniffing - Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come.
• New API Browser - a new API browser developed by Remy Sharp.
  

The full details of the release can be found in the release notes: http://docs.jquery.com/Release:jQuery_1.3.

Microsoft released a Hotfix to accompany the new jQuery VSDoc file.  The Hotfix is now available at the MSDN Code Gallery.  Here's a direct download link for this small (2MB) patch:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB958502/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1736

This patch is intended for all JavaScript files, not just those related to jQuery.  Generally, Visual Studio will opportunistically look for documentation files related to the script file.  For example, given "mylibrary.js", we will search in the same directory for:

mylibrary-vsdoc.js, then if we don't find it we will search for...
mylibrary.debug.js, then if we don't find it we will search for...
mylibrary.js

This Hotfix is targeted at the latest public Visual Studio release, which today is VS2008 SP1.  If you're using VS2008 you will need to upgrade to SP1 before taking advantage of this patch.
 

Microsoft Corp. today provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).

Today’s announcement included an in-depth look at how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) will help democratize ALM with a unique solution that brings all the members of a development organization into the application development life cycle, and removes many of the existing barriers to integration. Additional details on the other focus areas will be disclosed over the product development cycle.

“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.”

You can read an overview of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 by clicking here.

As you may have heard from Scott Guthrie or Scott Hanselman, Microsoft announced that it will make jQuery part of the official dev platform. JQuery will come with Visual Studio in the long term, and in the short term it'll ship with ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft will also ship a version of Visual Studio which includes Intellisense.

jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. You can read John Resig's (jQuery Team) post about this big announcement.

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code.  jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them.  One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another.  jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands.  The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Well, I get to be one of the lucky people that gets to go to the Microsoft PDC 2008 Conference in Los Angeles, CA on October 27-30. Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attend the PDC to understand the future of the Microsoft platform and to exchange ideas with fellow professionals. You’ll learn about upcoming products, meet Microsoft’s leaders and top engineers, and write some code.

At this year's conference, Microsoft will be giving a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits from the conference to each attendee instead of a collection of DVDs as in the past. It is even rumored that a Beta version of Windows 7 will be included as well.

Channel 9 on MSDN has been producing a series of Countdown to PDC 2008 videos to help everyone get a great overview of what to expect this year at PDC. Here is just a few of the videos that you can watch about the upcoming conference:

• This is the Software + Services PDC: Mike Swanson
• By Developers, for Developers: Don Box and Chris Anderson
• Building Block Services, John Shewchuk
• Extending the Data Platform to the Cloud: Dave Campbell
• Amitabh Srivastava: Corporate Vice President of Cloud, Infrastructure, & Services

Microsoft has released a new version of the AJAX Control Toolkit - Version 3.5.20820.

The 2008-08-20 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit targets the official release of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5SP1.zip is the full release package with complete source code to all controls, the test framework, VSI, and more.
AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5SP1-NoSource.zip contains only the sample web site and VSI and is for people who don't need or want the source code for the controls.

To start using the Toolkit in your own web sites, please follow the instructions on the Setup Walkthrough.

To start building your own extenders, launch the VSI installers on your machine. This will install new Visual Studio templates that contain everything you need to build extenders.

To get started with source code, simply load the "AjaxControlToolkit.sln" solution in Visual Studio 2005, and run the solution. This will launch the web site and allow you to experiment with the different controls. Also included in the solution is the source code for all the controls.

Please see the sample website release notes for more details.