On December 2, 2010 at the Silverlight Firestarter event, Microsoft promised to deliver beta of next generation Silverlight to testers in Q2 of 2011. And now the time has come, the company announced that they will be releasing Silverlight 5 Beta next week at MIX11.

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.

Silverlight 5 introduces more than 40 new features, which include:

• Supports GPU accelerated video decoding
• Built in 3D graphics support
• Variable speed playback of media content with automatic audio pitch correction
• Improved power awareness
• Built in Remote-control support
• Supports faster application startup
• Provides 64-bit browser support
• Automated UI testing support for applications with Visual Studio 2010
• Delivers improved text clarity
• Developers can now debug data-binding expressions, set breakpoints on bindings.

The final release is expected to release by end of 2011.