The first positive sign for the platform's developers is the fact that Microsoft made Silverlight 5's release candidate stage available at the beginning of this month. This points to an official final release in the near future. While Silverlight 5's upcoming release is good news, Microsoft put a damper on it when it recently debuted Windows 8 and noted that it would favor HTML5 instead. In addition, the company said that plugins would not be supported on Windows 8's Metro version of Internet Explorer, leaving plugins such as Silverlight and Adobe Flash out in the cold. Add in a strategy o...