This article was written by Alan Mendelevich

Hi

Recently I’ve been working on a set of custom WPF controls.

There are numerous good books and articles about WPF in general and some basic information on custom control development but I have yet to find a good article (or book) with in-depth coverage of custom control development in general and design-time related issues in particular.

We never published a lists of blog posts we liked, so this will be the first time. I gathered some links from my Google Reader shared items, some of those links are old, some are new, but I liked them all. So here is the list of 7 post/articles I recommend:

1. Phil Haack is talking about the fact that The Design Is Never Right The First Time. I think that it is OK that the design won’t be right the first time, but it should be good at the first time. Explanation: the fact that Phil could change the implementation over night tells me that his initial design was very good. It is not that simple to change the design and the implementation so close to the deadline… I know some projects where you can’t replace some code just like that, it will take too much time to do it…
2. Scott Hanselman tells that there is a post at the Microsoft StyleCop blog that shows some rules about directives outside and inside the namespace declaration. In his post Back to Basics - Do namespace using directives affect Assembly Loading?, he discovers that we shouldn’t believe everything we read, even on a Microsoft Blog.
3. Jeff Atwood wrote about Dealing With Bad Apples in a team and that if you tolerate even one developer whom the other developers think is a problem, you’ll hurt the morale of the good developers. I totally agree, those situations lead to a very negative attitude in the team and after some time, it is too late because the “cancer” has spread to the whole team.
   
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During the Job Interview Challenge Series we are running here at Dev102.com, we usually get some comments from readers who think that the quality of a specific question is not good. Here are some of those comments:

1. “I hate interview questions like this, as it’s just a race to see who gets the a-ha moment first“.
2. “This is not a good interview question. What does it tell you about someone’s engineering ability? Little. It’s a brain-teaser; either you get it or you don’t”.
3. “Really enjoying the problems so far but I’m a little disappointed with this one. I prefer ‘thinking’ problems to ‘research’ ones“.
4. “Isn’t this an awfully language-specific question?“.
5. “If you presented this problem in an interview and made me an offer, I’d turn you down“.

On the other hand, many readers provided answers to the questions and enjoyed participating in those challenges. Some thought that the questions are very good: