When using ASP.NET MVC you have a wide degree of freedom, especially compared to the traditional ASP.NET WebForms. But with that freedom comes a degree of complexity and choices, one of those choices is how to handle asynchronous calls, manipulation of the DOM, and all the other necessary client side behaviors. Luckily there are a bunch of choices to choose from now days, one that I have lots of experience with is JQuery, and in my opinion it is the most mature and has the most support. JQuery has many plugins that you can download to extend its behavior in order to give you additional functionality. It has a very easy to use syntax to manipulate the DOM and it has a very large user base which makes finding solutions to your problems very easy.
In addition, ASP.NET MVC and JQuery go together quite well, which can not be said for ASP.NET WebForms. Although JQuery does work with WebForms, I know I have used it extensively, there are several issues you will run into when using it. With ASP.NET MVC, those issues are nearly nil, mostly because ASP.NET MVC drops the legacy life cycle of WebForms for a more HTML driven approach for the view. This makes it extremely easy to use these open source frameworks that have been so hard to integrate in the past.
I have done a bit of research on this topic, there is a good StackOverflow post about this very same subject and it was answered with quite a bit more detail. My ultimate decision at this time is I am going to try to keep it lean and stick to only using JQuery. Microsoft has started to fully back JQuery on multiple fronts, they are shipping ASP.NET MVC with JQuery. Shortly they will also start to ship Visual Studio 2010 with JQuery, and they also offer the latest versions of JQuery through their Content Delivery Network (CDN).
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