This morning a colleague of mine asked me for a list of questions to prepare for a .Net technical interview.

I thought it would be useful to share this list with everyone.

A) Developer

1) OO

• Explain principles of Object Orientation?
• Can you use abstract classes in place of Inheritance ? What are the differences between these two concepts?
• Explain polymorphism and write an example in code (C#).

2) Patterns

• What are Patterns?
• List some patterns you’ve already used.
• Explicit one pattern by writing a small example.
• Explain following patterns: Repository, Factory, Root Aggregate.

3) UML

• What are the most useful UML diagrams? (list & explain at least 5) .

4) Net & C#

• What is .Net? (Managed Code - CLR - Runtime) ?
• Explain concepts as JIT, CLR, GAC, GC?
• Explain series of processing steps an ASP.NET page goes through (= page lifecycle of ASP.NET) ?
• Explain following c# keywords: Static, ReadOnly, Const?
• What is: a Webservice,WCF, WPF, Silverlight and how do these technologies/concepts relate to each other?

5) DB

• Write simple query that joins 2 tables via a 1-to-N relation that contains a filter and a group by clause.
• Explain what is a Transaction.
• What are the properties of a transaction (-> ACID)
• Explain concepts as Primary Key & Clustered Index and how these concepts relates?
• Is a GUID a good Clustered index, explain why?

B) Architect

• List and explains the Enterprise Integration patterns, provide advantage/inconvenient for each of them? ->(Primary integration patterns: Database, WebServices, Messaging)
• What are non functional requirements, provide some examples (e.g. Accessibility, Availability, Security…)?
• Explain concept Authentication/Authorization how does these concept relates?
• What is Asynchronous Messaging - what type of infra do you need to set it up?
• Explain – what is an ESB?
• What is SOA & list and explain SOA Tenets?

C) Senior Developer / Team Lead

• What is IOC - What is the Goal - which frameworks do you know?
• Explain what are Unit tests and Integration tests, what differentiate these two types of tests?
• Provide a small list of programming practices that you would enforce/setup in your dev team?
• What is Waterfall/Prince2/RUP/Agile/XP/Scrum - how does these concepts relates ?
• What is DDD?

Some other useful/funny resources:

• C# design patterns:
  http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx
• Techinterviews.com : http://www.techinterviews.com/interview-questions/net ***
• Megasolutions.net: http://www.megasolutions.net/
• Scott Hanslemann post on the same subject: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CommentView.aspx?guid=d835178f-a649-45f5-907f-28ad1177d8d5
• Sample interviews: http://simasc.com/attachments/046_SampleInterviewQuestionBook(1).pdf
• The guerilla guide to interview: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html 
• Some funny Interviews @ Microsoft (this was for an advertisement for Ms technical certifications):
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cvurGdIOjs 
• Video of interview process @Microsoft (real one this time): http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/WM_IN/Zoe-Goldring-and-Gretchen-Ledgard-What-is-it-like-to-interview-at-Microsoft/