Determining what ports Tomcat is running on

I've recently had problems connecting to a Tomcat server setup by another developer. In order to troubleshoot these problems, I wanted to use netstat to see what ports were being bound to, but apparently server sockets don't come up by default. If you really want to see what server sockets are in use on your machine, use the following :

netstat -lntp

The undocumented 't' option will cause netstat to show server sockets.

Event models in Silverlight vs WPF

To really understand the event model in Microsoft's Silverlight / WPF frameworks, you need to start off with a proper mental model. You can think of the root XML element in a XAML object as being at ground level. Each successive child XML element goes deeper into the ground. With that in mind, there's two terms that are used in both of these frameworks to describe how event handlers propagate between objects : Bubbling and Tunneling. With Tunneling, event handlers start at the root XML element, and "tunnel" deeper into the "earth" (your control stack) until they get to the original source of the element, which is your controls. With Bubbling, event handlers start at the original source of the element (your control which initiated the event), and then "bubble up" to the root control. We use the earth analogy because the terminology goes hand in hand with gravity : tunnelling follows gravity, like digging into the earth, and bubbling goes against gravity, like a bubble coming up to the surface from the bottom of the ocean. I never really had a clear mental model of the Silverlight / WPF event models until right now.

With all that said, there are some differences between Silverlight and WPF that turn out to be very important when it comes to implementing your event handlers, and maintaining compatibility between the two. The biggest difference is that WPF supports both Bubbling and Tunneling events, whereas Silverlights supports only Bubbling events. Keep this in mind if you're designing desktop applications that you might want to port over to web applications at some point