Silverlight 5 announced at today’s Silverlight Firestarter

Today’s Silverlight Firestarter event featured a keynote from Scott Guthrie where he revealed lots of great new features coming in Silverlight 5. Given the fact that the announcements were not accompanied by the availability of downloadable beta (or even CTP) bits, I’m pretty sure it was an important way to calm the angst of those who have been hearing that Silverlight is dead.

For a great comprehensive list of the features, read this blog post by Tim Heuer.  Some of my favorites are the TrickPlay feature, the testing capabilities, the raw printer support, and the XAML debugging. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!

As an aside, it’s amazing to see that the event was streamed live at 720p to over 13,000 viewers. I was impressed by the image clarity. We watched the event at the Microsoft office, and when the speaker’s desktop was being shown, you could read the code clearly. In fact, it looked as if the projected image was shared from a presenter’s desktop live from the podium.

Look for some great samples and videos coming soon! And if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to watch the replay of the firestarter to get some great information on data binding. RIA services, REST architectures and more.