Microsoft has made Silverlight 5 available for download.

Here are some of the 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

The question on my mind is if anyone should invest in Silverlight 5, will there be a version 6 or is this the last version that will be delivered? You can still use your Silverlight skillset to build WinPhone apps but the future is HTML 5 + JavaScript.

Take a look at the Windows 8 Win RT image…see SilverLight anywhere?

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Silverlight also doesn’t run in the browser on mobile platforms, Adobe announced a couple of weeks ago that they are stopping developing Flash for mobile platforms as well…yes Steve Jobs is laughing from his grave. IE 10 on the Metro version of Windows 8 does not support plugins, this means no Flash or Silverlight

Either way, you can download Silverlight 5 here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ it might be the last version that you will download

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