text: During the keynote at Microsoft's 'Firestarter' event in Redmond, Scott Guthrie announced a beta of Silverlight5, which will be available in Q2 of 2011.
  During the keynote at Microsoft's 'Firestarter' event in Redmond, Scott Guthrie announced a beta of Silverlight 5, which will be available in Q2 of 2011.
  From a developer's point of view the most important features are probably the use of graphics hardware acceleration and the introduction of a new trusted application mode where you can finally create a web app that does the work of a desktop app without having to breakout of the sandbox. If you want to create complex applications then this is exactly the freedom you need - and it seems to be delivered in a relatively secure way.
  Silverlight has supported some GPU acceleration but only in out-of-browser mode. Moonlight (the open source Linux implementation of Silverlight) recently boasted about having GPU support and now it looks as if Silverlight will follow suit by incorporating this and a faster immediate graphics mode.
  The proposed new features are a little vague but the complete list given is:
  Cross-platform Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated 3-D application programming interface (API) provides rich graphics on the Web for building advanced data visualizations and rich user experience (UI)
  A new class of trusted applications
  that brings desktop capabilities to the browser. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won't need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks:
  Out-of-browser trusted applications are further enhanced
  Existing unmanaged code can be called directly from within Silverlight with PInvoke.
  enables 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. This provides smoother user experiences when, for example, items are inserted into a list.
  MVVM databing
  Networking and Windows Communication Foundation enhancements
  If Microsoft can deliver a reasonable part of this list, and if the graphics and security modes are delivered, then this is enough to make Silverlight an easy way to create the sort of web apps we need and way more powerful than HTML5.
  Silverlight is alive and well
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  Microsoft has handed Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to the community in the form of the .NET Foundation.