Silverlight 5 announced and now available

Microsoft has last Friday announced the RTW (Release To Web) version of Silverlight 5. This means that the technology is now available for production use, and can be downloaded here.

Again, there are plenty of new features in this release, including the following:

• 64-bit browser support and multi-threaded JIT compilation to support multiple cores
• Multiple-window support on Silverlight 5 Out-Of-Browser applications and P/Invoke support (!)
• Hardware-accelerated decodíng of H.264 media
• PivotViewer: the ability to create pivot views directly using built-in controls

All this sounds very good to me. But I think the most pressing question is, where is the show around this launch? I haven't seen any big announcements, Silverlight 5 is just a small note on Silverlight.net web pages, and is a big contrast to the usual fanfare that Silverlight versions have come to the world.