Microsoft announces that the jQuery will be included in the Visual Studio IDE. It is a great help for ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX developers.

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

See post here. 

Today, I downloaded the July 2008 CTP of Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008.

Windows Live™ Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 are a set of control add-ins to make incorporating Windows Live services into your Web application easier with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008.

 There are 6 controls that were included in the CTP release:

• Contacts Control
• IDLoginStatus Control
• IDLoginView Control 
• MessengerChat Control 
• SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer Control
• Map Control 

Among these controls, what I am excited to experiment with is the Map Control. I'm interested in developing application that uses maps, e.i. Google Maps, Yahoo Maps but I hate javascript so my plan didn't materialize. Thanks to this controls release for ASP.NET I can now start experimenting with these.  

Find the full details of the CTP and Windows Live Tools here.

It would be worth checking the new release from Microsoft Research called PEX if you are tired of old school way of writing unit tests.  

Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs.

Explore what PEX can offer here.

Today, I decided to try and use a custom theme for VS IDE to have it a new look. I downloaded Moria Alternate by Tomas Restrepo.

 Take a look.