Chalk up one for not despising it here. I've been using it for the past few months and there's definitely a fairly steep learning curve if you've never used a DVCS before. It certainly has some quirks and annoyances, but as I get used to things I see the benefits. I think the key is finding a workflow that works for what you're doing. I generally use SourceTree as a GUI, which is pretty good, and fall back to the command line when doing some things that aren't supported (interactive rebase being the primary one)

Saying it happened because of new trading software that had been installed is a bit simplistic. There's a more detailed explanation of what happened here: http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lose-172-222-a-second-for-45-minutes[^] It's quite painful reading!!

Second those choices, and WPF Control Development Unleashed is also a decent read once you've covered WPF Unleashed.

How does it dismantle encapsulation? You can't do anything with an extension method that you couldn't otherwise do with a static helper method that takes the extended object as a parameter - it's just in a slightly more convenient format.