We last heard from Microsoft's Silverlight team on Sept. 1, when a Release Candidate (RC) version of Silverlight 5 was made available. Now, the final release is ready, according to a Dec. 9 post on the company's Silverlight blog.

Microsoft's Silverlight installer

The multimedia framework -- used by Netflix, for example, to stream movies to its customers -- again supports Windows and Macintosh desktop clients, via browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

According to Microsoft's blog posting, new features in Release 5 include:

• hardware decode of H.264 media, "which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU"
  
  
• Postscript vector printing to improve output quality and file size
  
  
• an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives

In addition, the company says, Silverlight 5 "extends the Trusted Application model to the browser for the first time." These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, reportedly mean users won't need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, COM and file system access, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight.

Background

Silverlight 5 builds on the foundation of Silverlight 4 for building business applications and rich media experiences. Among other capabilities, it delivers video quality and performance improvements, and features that improve developer productivity, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says Silverlight 5 offers improved media support and rich UI capabilities. For example, GPU support helps lower-power devices render high-definition video; TrickPlay allows video to be played at different speeds and supports fast-forward and rewind; and audio pitch correction allows users to speed up videos while preserving a normal audio pitch. Also, improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video, and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active, the company adds.

Silverlight 5's fluid user interface is said to enable smoother animation within the UI. Inter-Layout Transitions allow developers to specify animations to apply when elements are added, removed or re-ordered within a layout, according to Microsoft.

Other cited Silverlight 5 performance improvements include:

• reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking
• XAML parser improvements that speed up startup and runtime performance
• support for 64-bit operating systems
• and reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking

Meanwhile, Silverlight 5 also adds Microsoft Visual Studio profiling support, including CPU, memory, and thread contention. Visual Studio Team Test support is included as well, according to Microsoft.

Availability

The Silverlight 5 installer can be downloaded now via this direct link.

eWEEK writer Darryl K. Taft contributed background to this report.

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