.net Job Interview

Question

I have a job interview tomorrow for a .net shop. For the past few years I have been developing in languages other than .net and figure it is probably a good idea to brush up on what is cool and new in the world of .net. I've been reading about LINQ and WPF but these are more technologies than trends. What else should I look at?

Been reading things like:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332048.aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms754130.aspx

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As it turns out this interview was high level and we didn't really get into much which was more .net specific than generics.

Answer 1

This is completely language agnostic so you may want to skip over it, but I've based a lot of my practice and preparation for job interviews around Steve Yegge's getting a job at google post.

I use a lot of the topics there not only as an interview preparedness guide, but also as a list of things that I SHOULD know about. Admittedly I am still working my way through some of the books and exercises, but every little bit helps.

EDIT: I'm not sure if it necessarily a good thing to focus specifically on the latest trends in web development for job interviews. When I am interviewing someone I am more impressed if they can write a recursive function to solve some problem or write a really cool algorithm, then if they know all the details about some latest thing that is going to fix everything but it's really just a buzzword

Answer 2

If you're doing web development, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight (née WPF/e) come to mind as relatively recent trends.

Answer 3

Take this with a grain of salt, but in my experience, LINQ and WPF are still in the realm of "yeah we'd like to get into that someday".

Most shops are still on VS2005 and .NET 2.0, so I'd want to make sure I was up to speed on core facilities:

• generics
• ADO.NET
• WinForms / WebForms depending

And so forth.

Answer 4

It's probably a bit late to be looking tonight at code trends for an interview tomorrow.

Microsoft is currently busy doing what it has always done: me-too functionality, only better. New dynamically typed languages with a new language runtime and MVC are looking really promising.

With WPF and Expression they're creating different interfaces for UI developers and business logic developers to use. I'm not sure about that - I'd rather see Expression Blend as part of VS.

They're pushing open source more than they ever have - http://www.codeplex.com is getting busier. VS Express editions are an excellent route in to the technologies.

With their Team System they're pushing Agile methods more and more - they've even resolved them with more structured processes like CMMI.

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-1? serves me right for starting with a sarcastic comment ;-(

How about: how to hack an interview?

Answer 5

As a student of many languages/frameworks, I can't stress enough that you shouldn't be concentrating on the whizz-bang latest and greatest stuff. It's a solid understanding of the tried and true programming principles (see design patterns, DRY principle, OOP conventions, etc.) and general familiarity with the framework that employers (and fellow developers) are looking for.