After much silence from the mother ship, which led to a lot of rumor mongering by people far and wide, Microsoft has officially announced it support policy for Silverlight 5. You can read the full announcement here (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean45), but to sum it up, SL5 will be supported until 10/12/2021 for IE 8+, FF 3.6+, and Chrome 12+ on Windows 7 as well as FF 3.6+ and Safari 4+ on Mac OS 10.5.7+.
This is great news for the development community as well as business decision makers, and a much needed change in direction by Microsoft by actually disclosing some real information instead alternating between veiled hints and silence. My fellow developers in the SL space have reported news from projects cancelled (some just weeks away from deployment), to entire companies moving away from Microsoft development technologies because there wasn’t any indication of what the future may hold. Finally, we have something we can take to our customers and show them that their investments will continue to be supported.
Happy Coding!