There is not much I can write about next version of Silverlight that hasn’t been written somewhere else, but I feel like I must mention it on my blog, simply because it’s – great!

Silverlight 5 was announced on Silverlight Firestarter event on December 2nd by Scott Guthrie himself, with lots of slides as well as demos. Silverlight 5 is not public yet (not even in beta) – public beta is planned for the first half of the next year (probably on Mix11 in April) and the final version should be available in the second. That’s about 1 – 1,5 years after the release of Silverlight 4, which is a bit slower than we’ve been used to, but still very short release cycle.

New feature set is impressive, and it is not complete one – until beta and final version, we should see even more features. I’ve never liked copy-pasting from other blogs, linking seems more natural, so here there are:

• Scott Guthrie’s post
• John Papa’s post (more details)
• official Silverlight site
• watch a keynote from Silverlight Firestarter event (demos!)
• check out all Firestarter sessions, especially labs (for Silverlight 4)

My top 5 new features are (in random order, maybe not the best features out there, but will be great for some of my projects):

• TrickPlay (fast-forward, rewind with audio pitch correction- needed this in one project a few months ago)
• Vector printing
• Debugging breakpoints on bindings
• Multiple windows in OOB
• Elevated trust “mode” within the browser (not that simple as it sounds, but it sounds good)

If you’re interested in Silverlight 5 and live in Croatia, come to our big local community event on Saturday (Dec 11) and check out my session on Silverlight 5. It’s free and will be fun, register here.