The West Michigan Day of .Net had some good talks.  I really enjoyed the advice Josh Holmes had on always having a 2-5 year plan.  It is the basis to his success and was a great motivator.

He also discussed three things you should never bring into the workplace:

1. Sex

2. Religion

3. Politics

His power point had some good quotes like "Eat like a bird poop like an elephant."  Good advice.

An interesting aspect of C# that I have never heard of was yield return method which basically maintains the state of objects returned by a method.

Here is an article that explains it.

The coolest thing I learned was about Microsoft's Empower Program.  It gives a Premium MSDN Subscription and 5 internal + 5 client licenses for a wooping $375 for the first two years!  This is great for MISVS which only have 1-5 developers.

To top the conference off, I won a book on Software Estimation.

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Best Practices (Microsoft)) by Steve McConnell Read more about this book...

I will be attending the West Michigan Day of .NET.  See you there!

Looks like there will be some interesting talks.

It is very simple to hide an element with javascript.  In this example we will use a panel as the element to show/hide.

First we must include the script to do the work we will call it showHide.  You can do this in the html or register it via the ScriptManager.  This function is not limited to panels.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
   function showHide(id)
   {
       var el = document.getElementById(id);
       if(el.style.display == 'none')
       {
           el.style.display = 'block';
       }
       else
       {
           el.style.display = 'none';
       }
   }

    </script>

Next we can use an object to trigger the script.  We will do a hyperlink and a button.  Inside the form put:

<input type="button" onclick="showHide('<%=Panel1.ClientID%>');" 
value="Show/Hide"><a href="#" onclick="showHide('<%=Panel1.ClientID%>');
">Show/Hide</a> <asp:Panel ID="Panel1" runat="server">Panel to Show/Hide
</asp:Panel>

Here we used Panel1.ClientID in the showHide method on the onlick event incase you have a masterpage.  If you have a masterpage, the controls inside the contentplaceholders are renamed.  For the link we put # because we do not want to to actually post anywhere.

Demo

On Saturday, I had the pleasure to attend Microsoft's first event within Second life.  The event was based on the Heroes happen here launch event.  There were about 300 people throughout the three separate tracks. 

After joining Second Life for the event, I took about an hour to walk around and thought to myself, this place is full of weirdos.  I didn't think I would ever come back after the event except for other Technical events.  However, at the event I realized that this is a great networking tool once you find people interested in the same things.  A good group is SLDNUG which represents .Net users in SL.  There were also a number other tech events going on Saturday.

While a few technical issues did occur, I think it went very well and look forward to more of these gatherings.  Take a look at the photos.