Microsoft delivered the final version of its Silverlight 5 product this week.

Silverlight 5 includes new capabilities such as Hardware Video Decode, for enhanced video quality and performance, and “Trickplay,” which provides variable-rate video playback with audio pitch correction. Silverlight 5 also offers a new Microsoft XNA-based interface for delivering 3-D visualizations within applications, along with a host of new features for developers. Silverlight 5 is likely to be the final version of Silverlight. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley notes that the company plans to support Silverlight 5 until 2021.

Silverlight 5 also extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser. System administrators can enable the features via group policy and they allow greater control over multiple window support, trust support in browser and HTML hosting within Silverlight. Silverlight 5 also includes the following developer related enhancements:

  • 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
Microsoft Silverlight