Microsoft: Silverlight 5 beta to be released at MIX11 next week

By Tom Warren, on 5th Apr 11 5:34 pm with 8 Comments

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it plans to ship a beta copy of Silverlight 5 at MIX11 next week.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Platform, penned a blog post on Tuesday to explain Microsoft’s thoughts on Silverlight vs HTML5. “As we have been more vocal about our commitment to and investment in HTML5 as our direction going forward, we have received questions from the community about the future of plug-ins, and how Silverlight is viewed as part of an overall solution set,” said Guthrie. Microsoft provided a quick outline of its developer story:

  • For plug-in based experiences, we believe Silverlight delivers the richest set of capabilities available to developers today, making the choice of Microsoft technologies even more compelling.
  • For Windows Phone development, Silverlight and XNA are the core fundamental building blocks for building rich experiences that take full advantage of Windows Phone.
  • HTML5 is a solution for many scenarios, and developers should make the appropriate choice based on application needs, knowing that we have a heritage and a future vision of supporting a wide variety of technologies to meet those needs.

Guthrie also unveiled that the company will ship its first beta of Silverlight 5 at MIX11, which starts on April 12. “As part of the continued support for scenarios that require plug-in based capabilities, we will ship a beta of Silverlight 5 at MIX, with some great demos for compelling scenarios,” said Guthrie.

WinRumors will be reporting closely on Microsoft’s MIX11 announcements, stay tuned for full coverage next week.

  • http://twitter.com/Daniel_H_UK Daniel Hartshorn

    Super i will be downloading that next week

  • Anonymous

    Should see a boost in AMD APU and Intel Atom sales next week if people test out Netflix HD working accelerated with SL5

  • http://twitter.com/MikeInBA mike g

    Silverlight may not be the next flash, but MS is doing pretty well positioning it as a cross platform UI environment.

  • GP007

    Great, so just what I expected for MiX, and it makes sense. Can’t wait to get some details on features and also news about updating the SL/XNA support on WP7 which is currently using mostly SL3 with some SL4 stuff backported.

  • MVE

    Exelent.

  • http://twitter.com/oolong2 oolong2

    No surprises here.

  • Hiro

    Each Developer could be able to choose what web tech to use.
    I don’t like Javascript, i’t slow, difficult to debug and and i want to use C# even on client side. So thank you microsoft to give me that CHOICE.

    For some simple stuff i can use JavaScript in my website, for freestylke design ad complicated RIA/animations , Silverlight is the BEST choice versus handcoded Javascript.

    New Html tags can be used if yousupport some fallback for old users (IE 7-8) that are about 50% people worldwide.

  • Blake

    Sadly even ie9 doesn’t support many HTML5 features yet.