How to show popup on button click in MVC3 using jQuery?

To handle button click events and show a div on the click you can do:

$("#button").click(function() {
    $("#yourDialog").show();
});

http://jsfiddle.net/yGtwT/

You could also use a jQuery Dialog to show a "popup".

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("#yourDialog").dialog();
}); 

$("#button").click(function() {
   $("#yourDialog").dialog('open');
});​

http://jqueryui.com/dialog/

Use something jquery library that contains modal dialog.

Here's how I display a pop up box that selects various tag values, first the html:

<div style="display: none">
    <div id="tagDialogBox" title="Add Tags">
    @* other html here *@
    </div>
</div>

Here's the jQuery, note that you need to add .parent().appendTo($("formname")) in order to allow the dialog fields to be submitted as part of the form:

function showTagDialogBox() {
    $('#tagDialogBox').dialog({
        autoOpen: true,
        title: "Select Tags",
        modal: true,
        height: 530,
        width: 800,
        buttons: {
            "Ok": function () {
                $(this).dialog("close");
            }
        }
    }).parent().appendTo($("form:first"));

    return false;
}

This is extremely simple.

<input type="button" onclick="$('dialogbox').dialog();"/>

Also, examples on the jquery ui page. This one is very simple (though it also includes animation, you can pull that out as an example)

http://jqueryui.com/dialog/#animated