Silverlight 5 was released today and there are a ton of great new features available in this release. You can download the Silverlight 5 tools for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 here.

One of the coolest new features is the built-in support Silverlight 5 now has for 3D. I’m doing a lot with 3D right now for a project (using Unity 3D) so this is a really exciting to me. Here’s an example of Silverlight 5 3D in action from the Babylon 3D engine page:

There’s also built-in support for new media features such as trick play which allows video to be played at different speeds with automatic pitch correction for audio, hardware decoding of H.264 media, text enhancements, new controls like the PivotViewer, and much more.

Over the years my consulting company has used Silverlight in Line of Business (LOB) scenarios quite extensively so I’m really excited about some of the new LOB features that Silverlight 5 provides. I recently wrote about several of the features so if you’re interested in more details check out the posts below:

• Implicit Data Templates
• Ancestor RelativeSource Binding
• Debugging Bindings in XAML
• Using pInvoke

Pete Brown provides a nice list of new features provided in Silverlight 5 that you can check out here.