Microsoft and jQuery have had a long partnership where Microsoft initially supported jQuery and included it in Visual Studio and ASP.NET. Microsoft then contributed templating functionality to jQuery by publishing a proposal, specification, and prototype on GitHub for the first jQuery templating plugin. The relationship between jQuery and Microsoft's ASP.NET Ajax library is also discussed, where they shared similar capabilities but Microsoft is no longer actively developing new features for ASP.NET Ajax and recommends using jQuery instead. The presentation concludes by encouraging developers to get involved with jQuery and attend Microsoft web camps to learn more.