Why not inherit from List?

Question

When planning out my programs, I often start with a chain of thought like so:

A football team is just a list of football players. Therefore, I should

Answer 1

When they say List is "optimized" I think they want to mean that it doesn't have features like virtual methods which are bit more expensive. So the problem is that once you expose List in your public API, you loose ability to enforce business rules or customize its functionality later. But if you are using this inherited class as internal within your project (as opposed to potentially exposed to thousands of your customers/partners/other teams as API) then it may be OK if it saves your time and it is the functionality you want to duplicate. The advantage of inheriting from List is that you eliminate lot of dumb wrapper code that is just never going to be customized in foreseeable future. Also if you want your class to explicitly have exact same semantics as List for the life of your APIs then also it may be OK.

I often see lot of people doing tons of extra work just because of FxCop rule says so or someone's blog says it's a "bad" practice. Many times, this turns code in to design pattern palooza weirdness. As with lot of guideline, treat it as guideline that can have exceptions.