In case you missed it yesterday, the release candidate of Silverlight 5 is now available for you to download and test against.

Silverlight 5 has a tonne of new features for developers to take advantage of. Back at the UK Tech.Days event in May, I talked about the feature-set including both;

  • What was present in the then beta version
  • What would be coming by the time of RTM

and if you’re interested and didn’t catch that talk then it’s available below and still relevant even in the light of the updated release candidate version;

Get Microsoft Silverlight

On top of the beta, the release candidate adds some of the things that I could only talk about at the time of the talk like;

  • Platform Invocation support (P/Invoke) for calling into native DLLs from Silverlight applications
  • Vector printing support
  • The updated PivotViewer control
  • Remote control and media command support
  • The DataContextChanged event
  • A 64-bit version of the plug-in for those running 64-bit browsers on 64-bit OSes

and Pete Brown has a good post with more detail on these along with links to other posts that he’s updated from the beta to the RC.

If you want to grab the bits and install them yourself then you can just pop over to the Silverlight downloads page and grab them from there.

One thing I’d add is that if you have been working with the beta then you should be aware that there was a preview version of Expression Blend ( “Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5”) which supported the beta. This version will not work with the updated RC version so if you’re dependent on Blend for Silverlight 5 then you might want to wait until a version of Blend comes out that is sync’d up with the new RC.

Enjoy!