Silverlight 5 was announced today and will be available next year. This announcement apparently was made earlier than originally planned, as a result of rumors regarding the state of Silverlight after PDC. The heavy promotion of HTML 5 , during the IE 9 demos, coming after a series of tweets by Scott Barnes earlier in the year, led to concerns over the future of Silverlight.
Prior to today, Scott Guthrie addressed this issue on at least two separate occasions, stating unequivocally that Silverlight is, and remains a “Key Development Platform”. Today’s announcement appears to be the punctuation on those remarks.
The reality is that HTML 5 and Silverlight are NOT competing technologies. Yes, there is some crossover, but the differences are so major, the conversation is just silly and not worth even entertaining.
For more information regarding this announcement and new features, visit Scott Guthrie’s blog.
– Michael Ossou