I’m back in Melbourne after 9 days on the road for Tech Ed New Zealand and Tech Ed Sydney. I had a great time, meet lots of interesting people and had many great conversations. I’ve already blogged about my Silverlight session, and all the content is now available online. Thanks to everyone who came to the session, and for the good evaluations.

Microsoft New Zealand have also published a lot of content on their Tech Ed Live site, and you can now watch my full Silverlight session online. So if you missed the session, or want the full story behind the Dive Log sample I recommend checking out the video.

In addition to my Silverlight session I also sat on a “the next 18 months - the future of the web” panel. Suzanne Tindal from ZDNet picked up some of the discussion around JavaScript and has written an article questioning if Chrome’s JavaScript poses a challenge to Silverlight. On the panel we started talking about how JavaScript is getting faster and faster, and how Chrome is upping the performance bar with its JIT compilation and JavaScript Virtual Machine. I got quoted several places in the article, which is really cool. As most of you guys who read my blog know I’m deeply into Silverlight and I have no doubt that it’s going to be an important technology in the years to come. That being said I do think that JavaScript will turn out to be a bigger competitor to Silverlight than Flash for developers deciding which technology to use for their rich Internet applications.

The ZDNet article is well written and should be an interesting read if you want to learn more about mine, Scott Hanselman and Harry Piersons perspectives on the future of JavaScript, web applications and Silverlight. The ZDNet  article also got cross posted on CNet. Paul Glazowski followed up with a new article about Silverlight battling Flash AND JavaScript over at at BuzzYa and Mashable.

With Tech Ed ANZ now being history the next big event is the Microsoft PDC conference in LA in October. I’m going and hope to see many of you guys there!