Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta Download Available

Microsoft is releasing a first beta of the Silverlight 5 at MIX11 conference in Las Vegas. The opportunity for Microsoft, again represented by Scott Guthrie to present some demonstrations of this plug-in, which seems to be moving increasingly towards specific fields such as video streaming or 3D. In short, the usage scenarios that HTML5 is not yet, according to Microsoft, is as powerful as Silverlight.

The main new features of Silverlight 5 concern because of these two aspects, with support for GPU acceleration in both cases: the decoding of the video, and integration of 3D. One remembers that at the last MAX, Adobe had introduced similar developments for Flash. Other new features include the Silverlight 64-bit support and the ability to vary the speed of a video without distortion. Silverlight Beta 5 can be downloaded from silverlight.net for Windows and Mac OS X. However, it is prudent to be used only for testing purposes.

Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta Features

• XAML Debugging with breakpoints for binding debugging
• Implicit data templates for easy UI reuse
• Double (and multi) click support
• GPU-accelerated XNA-compatible 3D and immediate-mode 2D API
• Low-latency sound effects and WAV support
• Real operating system windows and multi-display support
• Significant performance improvements, fixes and much more

What is good for the video, nothing to say but for everything else

- HTML is not really a programming language. To make great animation HTML5, must necessarily pass through javascript because not everything is achievable via CSS static
- To implement the HTML5 is the same way on all browsers, it will sink in water under the bridge
- Try to do the same animation with silverlight, flash and html5 which is easy to carry (dev tools, programming language that is a true high level language (not to criticize the javascript and css but I often go through the holes of n. ..), portability between different browsers without having to change one line of code)