Microsoft releases details of the upcoming Silverlight 5

Speaking at the Silverlight Firestarter conference yesterday, Scott Guthrie, the vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, reassured the masses of Silverlight's future by detailing the exciting new features in Silverlight in 2011.
On the application-development front, there's a ton of exciting new features. Font rendering has been improved (which is no surprise, given Silverlight's new home on the Windows Phone 7), lower-latency networking has been added,immediate mode graphics are now possible (cue some very sexy games and visualizations), and also some improved sandboxing features have been thrown in. Scott mentions better integration with IE9's hardware acceleration, too, but no real details are given.

Top of the bill, media-wise, is GPU-accelerated video decoding (I thought Silverlight 4 already did that?). There's a cool new feature called Trickplay that lets you alter the playback speed of Silverlight videos -- with pitch correction! (I've wanted this feature for so long -- why has Silverlight beaten you to it, Flash?) Finally, there's improved "power awareness," which will stop the screensaver kicking in while a Silverlight video is playing.

Exciting stuff, but we'll have to wait until "the first half of 2011" for the first beta!

Posted in: Microsoft