Silverlight 5 is now available as Microsoft unveiled the this new version in the Silverlight FireStarter event being held on December 2nd, 2010. The new Silverlight version is supposed to carry many changes and enhanced features which all combines together to provide a resourceful platform for generating premium quality media and applications. It has got new capabilities to deliver new opportunities in application development and media solutions. With this new announcement being made regarding the Silverlight 5, it is expected to make available the first beta version on the first quarter of the next year while a full fledged final release of Silverlight 5 will be available by the Q3 2011.



Silverlight 5 comes with many new changes and added features which are being followed by a lot of new and advanced tools for taking the productivity level to a new dimension for rich application development. Following are some of the key features of Silverlight 5 that is announced recently.

• The most happening feature of the new Silverlight 5 is believed to be its enhanced version of media experience. It will now feature the GPU based hardware acceleration for faster rendering and also to bring down the CPU load up to a significant extent.
• The playback feature for media contents can now be used in a varying speed according to one's requirements and all of this is possible without any problem in the pitch of the audio and its overall quality
• The power saver aspects has been enhanced to be more user-friendly and without causing annoyances with all the screensavers popping in during any media playback. It has now incorporated better way to optimize the power saver settings and its behaviour.
• The new Silverlight 5 will now be supporting remote controllers for dealing with various media playback controls and other such functionalities.

• Silverlight 5 has got some enhancements into its databinding features with the use of XAML which is intended to extend the developer productivity to a significant extent.
• WS-Trust is newly added to Silverlight 5 which is followed by improved WCF and RIA Services.
• The rendering of text has been improved to deliver better visibility and text clarity and is also optimized to offer significantly enhanced layout. It also comes with full OpenType font support and Postscript Vector Printing API built into it.
• Silverlight 5 introduces out-of-browsers support which can make use of Win32 APIs with its P/Invoke capabilities. Besides this, it has got an improved version of group policy support for dealing with security aspects of the Silverlight applications being developed with this new edition.

The Silverlight 5 comes with many promising features and capabilities to built advanced business applications and deliver premium media experience. It comes with lots of other features and support in addition to what is listed above which are all meant for feature-rich and more productive development and enhanced performance.