This coming Tuesday Redmond-based Microsoft Corp. is planning to make available five fresh security updates - two with a 'Critical' rating and three tagged 'Important'. The incoming parches are set to address bugs found in Windows, Internet Explorer and Silverlight.

One of the Critical updates will fix an Internet Explorer issue that has already been acknowledged and was exploited in a 'limited number of attacks'. Additional information about Tuesday's releases can be found in the Security Bulletin Advance Notification published here.

February's Patch Tuesday is closing in fast and, according to Microsoft, it's going to see the arrival of no less than nine updates - four rated 'Critical' and nine 'Important', that will crush 21 vulnerabilities.

The incoming patches tackle bugs that could lead to remote code execution and privilege elevation. As (almost) always, Microsoft didn't go into specifics but it did say the vulnerabilities affect Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and .NET/Silverlight. All the updates will be made available on Valentine's Day (February 14th) at about 10 am PST (6 pm GMT).

Today, we're happy to announce the release of Silverlight 5. Silverlight is part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the web, desktop and mobile devices. Download Silverlight 5, a free plug-in less than 7 MB in size that can be installed in less than 10 seconds.

New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives.

NVIDIA today announced that it is making its industry-leading NVIDIA 3D Vision video player technology available for free to Web developers, enabling them to easily build websites for streaming high-quality 3D video to 3D Vision-equipped PCs.

NVIDIA is the first company to deliver a 3D video plug-in for the Microsoft Media Platform (MMP) Player Framework v2.5 (F.K.A. Silverlight Media Framework) with support for active-shutter 3D glasses. The plug-in is based on the same technology that powers NVIDIA's popular 3D Web community, 3DVision Live. The MPP Player Framework is open-source code that enables developers to quickly deploy robust, scalable, customizable media-player applications for the Web, based on Microsoft Silverlight and with full support for IIS Smooth Streaming and Microsoft PlayReady DRM.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry's most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.

Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.

Nokia today announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world's leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

Microsoft recently launched the beta version of the new Microsoft Download Center website that intends to be more convenient and easier to navigate than the current version. The new website is powered by SilverLight technology which is Microsoft's anti-creation of Adobe Flash. You must have the SilverLight plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer in order to view this new beta site. From now on when you enter the Download Center you'll be asked to try the new SilverLight Beta Center.

Microsoft has officially delivered their first release of the Silverlight browser plugin designed to help companies produce rich, web-based applications and user experiences. When first announced, criticism arose around the lack of support for operating systems other than Windows and OS X. However, now Microsoft states they will be working with Novell to bring Silverlight to Linux and that more than 35 companies have joined to help the "Silverlight Partnership Initiative" launch.

More information on Silverlight can be found here.