With the lack of Silverlight content at the recent the PDC11 event and the looming invasion of HTML 5 the future of Silverlight seemed to be uncertain. However Microsoft has yet again confirmed its ongoing commitment to the technology during the Silverlight Firestarter 2010 live web cast held on the 2nd of December by announcing Silverlight 5

Faster load times, hardware acceleration, 64 bit runtime support and out of the box Pivotviewer  support were some of the features and improvements mentioned, however here are the key features which I found exciting.

Media

A plethora of new media rich capabilities will be shipped out with Silverlight 5 including:

• Trickplay enable users to play videos and audio at variable speeds. This also includes pitch correction so that voices sound normal during playback; perfect for watching training videos at a high speed in order to save time.
• Hardware video decode support – using GPU rather than the CPU to stream 1080p HD video for both live and on demand video, enabling much better performance.
• A power management feature enabling less battery usage as well as integration with the screen saver.
• Remote control support.
• IIS Media Services 4.0 enabling the delivery of premium media experiences for multiple platforms.
• Smooth live streaming capabilities delivered natively to multiple devices such as Windows Phone 7, iPad and iPhone without the need for Silverlight to be installed on the client.
• DVR (digital video recording) capabilities to enable users to pause and resume live casts – similar to TiVo.
• Expression Encoder – another extension to the Expression suite that enables end-to-end setup of live and on demand streaming applications.
• Azure support for IIS Media Services enabling the ability to scale up resources when needed.

Improved developer experiences

Microsoft has seen the light (that was nearly a pun) and has included many of the features that developers have requested, especially in regards to capabilities available in WPF which are missing in Silverlight. John Papa introduced five of the key new features which will be shipped with Silverlight 5.

• Layout transitions – no need to use complicated animation storyboards to animate the transition from one view to another. This can now be done in a few lines of XAML code.
• FindAncestor relative source bindings enabling child controls to search up through the visual tree to obtain a property from an ancestor’s data context of a particular type.
• Custom mark-up extensions enabling a control to bind directly to a method in a view model rather than having an event handler in the code-behind, establishing loosely coupled code and increasing testability.
• Bindings in the setters for styles enabling dynamic theming so that users can know change the skin of the application at runtime.
• And my personal favourite is the ability to set break points in XAML making it much easier to debug data bindings.

Graphics

Around 52 minutes into the web cast Luigi and Guido Rosso from Archetype gave an amazing demonstration of the GPU accelerated 3D modelling capabilities which will be shipped out with Silverlight 5. This really needs to be seen to be believed. Simply incredible!

Out of the browser experience

Silverlight 3 and 4 introduced the out of browser user experience allowing Silverlight applications to be installed on client machines using virtually any operating system.

This has now been enhanced with the ability to create child windows, just like any other desktop application framework. Also included is P/Invoke enabling Silverlight applications to securely invoke and interact with services on the client machine, for example, opening Excel and populating a spread sheet with data. This can even be achieved if the application is hosted within the browser!

I was personally getting a little worried with some of the rumours surrounding Silverlight but after watching this web cast, I have to say that future is looking bright for Silverlight.

Watch the web cast here to gain the full experience and all of the new Silverlight 5 offerings.