We’d like to open up submissions for talks for our conferences in London and Boston.

The dates are currently being firmed up, but currently we’re eyeing these days: London: Sept 13-14 Sept 8-9th or the 22-23rd; Boston: Oct 16-17. Please fill out the form if you’re interested in speaking at either of these events.

We will be sharing more information about these two epic events in the coming weeks.

On Monday, July 5th, John Resig will be at the Seattle jQuery/JavaScript community meetup at Amazon’s brand new Van Vorst Meeting Center in South Lake Union for an afternoon of learning, openspace, hacking and, of course, pizza!

The fun begins at 1pm with a quick keynote and explanation of open space technology then the group will self organize into smaller sessions run in an open space style until 6pm.

There will be plenty of pizza, refreshments and networking space to meet like minded developers, so come and meet, eat, learn and play with some of the Pacific Northwest’s best front end and interface developers. Topics will be suitable for beginners all the way through to advanced jQuery and JavaScript programmers.

This awesome event is provided for free and but you need to register to get in. Be sure to get your ticket quick.

Microsoft has submitted it’s second proposal to the jQuery Project outlining a plugin that allows properties within objects to be linked to each other. Termed “data linking”, the new plugin would allow changes made to a property of one object to effect a change on the property of a secondary object. The plugin leverages jQuery’s “special events” API to create a new event that will trigger when a change occurs on a bound object property. This would allow a developer to link properties in the following way:

var person = {};

$(“#name”).linkTo(“val”, person, “name”);

$(“#name”).val(“foo”);

alert(person.name); // foo

// … user changes value …
alert(person.name); // user typed value

The proposal has been submitted via the jQuery forums and Microsoft is actively soliciting community feedback:

http://forum.jquery.com/topic/proposal-for-adding-data-linking-to-jquery

A prototype of the data linking is available for review via Github:

http://github.com/nje/jquery-datalink

We’re pleased to see Microsoft’s continued contribution to our open source community and ask that you provide feedback in guiding this effort along.

The jQuery Project is excited to announce that Microsoft is expanding its support of the jQuery JavaScript Library through new initiatives, to include code contributions, product integration, and the allocation of additional resources.

Building on two years of collaboration with the jQuery Project, Microsoft announced today at MIX 2010 that it will be working with the jQuery Core Team and community to provide source code that will help to further advance the jQuery JavaScript Library. The planned contributions target specific functionalities in areas of mutual interest. They include:

• Templating
• Script Loading
• Data Binding

The initial focus will be on a new templating engine that will allow for easy and flexible data rendering via defined templates. Microsoft has submitted a proposal for public review along with an experimental plugin, and is actively collaborating with the jQuery team and community on a unified implementation. The templating engine will be reviewed and considered for inclusion into the jQuery JavaScript Library or maintained as an official jQuery plugin.

Microsoft will also ship a current release of the jQuery JavaScript Library in both Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC as well as continue to host current versions of the library on the Microsoft CDN.

Lastly, Microsoft will be providing resources to assist in QA testing of jQuery in new environments to ensure continued stability and longevity of the library.

We see these contributions as a tremendous benefit to the jQuery effort and community and look forward to continued collaboration with Microsoft.