Code Samples for interview [closed]

Code Samples for interview [closed] - c#

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Closed 11 years ago.
I recently applied for a developer position and the director there asked me to send some samples of code.
How should I approach this? Once, I sent a sample of code that I wrote for myself to a company and they didn't get back. This time, I want to be prepared and send appropriate samples. I want to know what I should send them, create a sample website/code it and send a link along with code files, or create a sample project, or some other approach.
I cannot send code that I have written for my previous and current employer, so I'm not sure what to send.
They asked for C#, HTML, CSS, JS, SProcs, triggers samples, so I thought: would it be nice if I create a project that includes all the above and send it to them, or should I send individual samples?

You've pretty much answered your own question. Why not create a project including all of the above? Small games are fun to write and you can demonstrate a lot of knowledge by creating one. Websites are good too, if you want to demonstrate things like good UI design and dynamic HTML and scripting knowledge.
It's essentially your portfolio to demonstrate what you're capable of, so apply all your knowledge. This includes not just what the program does but also how it does it -- good choice of algorithms, code architecture, proper naming of variables and appropriate comments, etc.
You can write code that's of just as high quality as what you'd create for an employer -- higher, in fact, since you have complete control over the methodology and standards used. Install one of the free revision control systems (git, mercurial, subversion etc), use bugzilla to track your bugs and todo list, and write a full suite of unit tests. Produce professional documentation and demo screenshots.
Yeah, that's a lot of work. But I can guarantee you that if such a project crossed my hiring desk, I'd have you in for an interview in a hot minute.

I've been in this situation before, and I usually just refuse to send them the code samples.
The reason is this: when I work for an employer, I'm working professionally, and the employer has exclusive rights to all the code. If I tried to copy the code and send it to another potential employer, I'm at risk of major intellectual property theft. On the other hand, if I create some code for my own use, it is by definition amateur code (even if produced by a professional), and doesn't have the same level of project management stricture, test stricture, etc., and is therefore not representative at all of my professional coding skills.
Companies that ask for this are effectively asking for the impossible. I find it best to point this out to them.

I'd take something I already worked on - preferably three-tier including sprocs, etc., and factor out anything of a sensitive nature. If it's something you wrote yourself then you will be comfortable discussing it and able to show the breadth of your knowledge - that's what will land you the job. A complete project shows that you know how everything fits together. One more thing: if they ask you where you go to find good code samples, do not immediately say Google: tell them you would look in their code base ;-)

Besides what you send them (a project, a website), I suggest you also give some thought as to what you want to convey with it, and give a written introduction to the sample: why you think it's an interesting piece of code? What does it showcase? What pieces are you proud of? What were the challenges?
They should be able to figure that out themselves, but there is no harm in helping people see what you want them to see...

WHen I intervoiew people I often ask them to give me some code. Usually I asked them to code infront of me though but I guess my point would be the same if the send it to me. I don't look at what they've done (the functionality) but how they've done it. What design principles guide their work. How tidy is the code. What's their test strategy. Have they used any patterns and if so are they used in a well thought way. Depending on the language I'd look for specific aspects of the language. In c++ I'd love to see them be capable of using template specialization elegantly (E.g. for traits/policies) in c#3.0 I'd look for propper use of lambda expressions, generics, LINQ I'd be looking for both correct use as well as over use.
Hope it gave you an idea of what kind of scrutiny you might be put through

Related

Designing a file center in asp.NET [closed]

I'll follow Ruben's formula: Your question is subjective to personal opinions. Here is mine:
Go on with Visual Studio, it can edit web pages very well, so you don't really need Dream Weaver, also it will help you in writing code and testing your application. Dream weaver may help do somethings like creating menus and stuff... I say you should learn to those things without dream weaver, still it is up to you.
User behaviour is not vital. Of course you can always choose to track user's activity for the convenience of suggestions, yet this feature will take a while to implement, and if we count that a good chunk of user will prefer to turn that off I say you should not put priority on this part of the project (unless, your project is exactly about that).
If in doubt, always have an Id. The columns Rubens suggests are good for auditory so consider that too. I want to tell you that security is paramount. All the cycle from login to logout, change password and such seems simple, but requires special attention. I will self-promote here a bit, start by My answer to Recover / Reset lost password options via email.
You can do it, really. The question is how long will it take (will it be done in time?), I mean... there is some learning involved as in anything. There two things you must know:
It is absurd to pretend you know the future. In software development, if you have done something in the past, chances are you can just reuse the code... if you definitively can't reuse your old code, it is because: a) you haven't done it or b) you haven't done it well enough. So, every time you are in front to a project there will be things that you haven't done, those will be the parts that take more time (because for the other, you just reuse) and it is ridiculously hard to tell how long will they take. So, No. I can't tell you if you are gonna do it in time, and also it is that way all the time and we get things done regardless.
You can always be mediocre... Bad advice? yes, a bit. But in truth, if you have to present something, anything, for a deadline... and you don't know what to do, you can always go with what you already know. This way you will pass easier, and also, you will get used to not push yourself (ergo, be mediocre). So, decide, what matters to you: Getting good grades*, or learning new things? [Yes, you can do both].
*: That is only a dichotomy if we assume bad teachers, good teachers will not give good grade to a project well done that tries nothing new, instead will incentive a project that is innovative but barely works (or that's the theory).
Remember to take a look at the antecedents, yes 4Shared, but also Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox, Mega...
Is your site, one where people do backup of personal media, or is it one where people share files with others? Will everybody be able to access uploaded files? Does it make sense to avoid duplicate files? Does it make sense to cipher the files (With a personal key?)? Do not answer me, just consider them.
Lasly, Tutorials? No, sorry. Still, you can researchs the parts, such as: access control, file upload, redirections, session management and so forth. Do don't really need a tutorial, take that idea out of your system, it is stopping you from being the one who does things for which there is no tutorial (and maybe write one?).
Anyway, I want to suggest to you to have a read of Post/Redirect/Get at Wikipedia And also in this very website. And I also want to suggest you to not hesitate to ask questions (ah, yes, search first, stand in the shoulders of giants).

Your question is subjective to personal opinions. Here is mine:
I would recommend Visual Studio for working with C# and ASP.NET.
Yes, you should keep the user behavior in database. You can track the user behavior with the user session, and saving each download related to the user session.
Any database tables should have an Id, CreationDate, CreatedBy, LastModificationDate and LastModifiedBy.
You should try and retry before telling yourself you can do something. If you are in university, you should learn to overcome obstacle and challenges.

Good OOP Design Priciples for Handling Database Data [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
I feel like I am asking a pretty basic question, and I think I should be able to find a good answer somewhere on the internet. But I am exhausted from searching and have only turned up a couple of dry bones. To top it all off, I am now frightened that this question is probably too subjective:)
Anyhow, here goes the question. What is considered good practice for accessing, processing, and manipulating data from a relational database in an object oriented program? So far in my programming I have been processing database data in a procedural sort of way. I am currently actively trying to improve my OOP habits and I wasn't sure how to handle this issue.
Here is one of the scenarios I am working with. I have a table with many manufacturing job entries in it. The application I am writing (improving) performs a lot of processing on each job. For example I iterate through each row in the table and do the following:
Post the due date to Google calendar
create a folder unique to the job in a given directory
create a work order for the job
create a contract brief for the job
manages traveler documents
email info to a couple people
etc, the list goes on
You get the point. A lot of processing gets done on each job. Currently I have what most good programmers would call a fantastic crap pile of spaghetti code. Maybe it isn't quite that bad, but almost. I iterate through each row in the table with a for each loop and sequentially perform each action on each row. I don't like the way things are currently designed, but I don't know what to do better.
I would like if I could have a neat object called "Jobs" which would implement all the properties of a job and provide a method for performing each of the actions. Then I could even make a custom collection to handle my jobs and all the world would be brighter. The whole solution would be more readable, easier to maintain, easier to add actions to perform on each job (which happens frequently), etc.
But my problem is I can't figure out how to make the connection between the fancy objects and the database. Should I use some sort of Object-relational mapping (I read all kinds of mixed opinions about this)? Do I just loop through all the rows and convert them to objects which accumulate in a collection? Or is the best option to keep going about such projects in a procedural sort of way? I would love your answers and input.
I am interested in information on this subject in an abstract way. In other words I wonder how to handle a situation like this in general. Not just specific to the example I gave. But of course specifics are great as well. I do most of my programming in Visual Basic and C# with VS 2010.

Look at the Repository pattern. It's a great way to separate data access from business processing in meaningful ways. Applying this pattern I have a few projects:
Entities - the objects that store stuff
DataAccess - the ORM DbContext and ADO.NET wrappers
Repository - wraps queries to present strongly-typed functions to the rest of the app
TheRest - the other projects / tiers: Business, GUI, etc
See How to use Entity Framework context with dependency injection? for a good description of each of the project types

But my problem is I can't figure out how to make the connection between the fancy objects and the database. Should I use some sort of Object-relational mapping (I read all kinds of mixed opinions about this)?
Yes.
As for the processing. Use the visitor pattern and let all different code which want to process the data register themselves as visitor. You could also use an inversion of control container to manage that (IHandlerOf<Job> or IHandlerOf<TravelerDocument>).
It gives you are more loosely coupled way of processing the data.

In a strongly-typed world, why isn't ASP.NET MVC's fragile dependency on naming conventions frowned upon? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
Since forever, strongly-typed objects have been a foundation of object-oriented programming. Fast-forward to 5 minutes ago, when working with the Entity Framework and MVC3, I was forced to add this to my Web.config:
<connectionStrings>
<add name="_MY_EXACT_CLASS_NAME_DbContext" connectionString="Data Source=blahblah.../>
</connectionStrings>
Great, My entire application depends on an arbitrarily-chosen name in an XML attribute. Is this really what modern programming looks like? Misspelling a class name is a serious offense, one the compiler leads us directly into fixing, but in this case, I'll just get a runtime exception message. If Mr. aforementioned exception message in a good mood, he'll point me toward Mordor, and I'll trudge off toward another Mount Doom of wasted debugging hours to destroy the invisible One-Typo-To-Rule-Them-All.
The same goes for Controllers:
routes.MapRoute("BE_CAREFUL","{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "ONE_FALSE_MOVE_AND",
action = "BUT_I_SWEAR_IT_SAID_BUILD_SUCCEEDED" }
);
It seems like things come and go in waves. Strongly-typed objects had their day in the sun, and now we're all girl-next-door over the anonymous "var". I'll admit, being coy about your type stirs up a lot of sexy scenarios - especially knowing you don't have to do any setup work - but here's The Actual Question:
How do the forefathers of object-oriented programming feel about our "advancement" of their art by adding a bunch of wishy-washy, do-sorta-whatever anonymous constructs while at the same time creating fragile dependencies on naming conventions?
For all we know, MVC4 might suddenly require that all names be preceded by exactly 4.7 spaces followed by lolcat ASCII art. Why? Because yes, that's why. Take a moment and marvel at the fact that you just witnessed the birth of a naming convention. Obviously, this is seriously solid foundational material for a flagship framework.
So, if there's one thing I want my entire codebase to both functionally and philosophically depend on, there's nothing more mission-critical to the mathematic logic of programming than..... Microsoft's® English-Language Naming Conventions!
</sarcasm>
</griping>

My entire application depends on an arbitrarily-chosen name in an XML attribute.
This is called "coding by convention" or "convention over configuration" ... you pick a few things that need configuration, and then everything else just "falls into place". Like using razor and having _layout.cshtml in /views/shared. Or like using razor and having mySpecialController with ActionResult Index and /views/mySpecial/Index.cshtml ... those are just a way of letting the convention work for you.
Since forever, strongly-typed objects have been a foundation of object-oriented programming.
Strongly-typed objects had their day in the sun, and now we're all girl-next-door over the anonymous "var".
var variables are just a shorthand to make things slightly more readable, the compiler still strongly and statically types things at compile time. Consider the difference here:
foreach (var c in Customers) { /* do stuff */ }
foreach (CustomerDataItem customerDataItem in Customers) { /* do stuff */ }
As you can see, the first one says "get a item c from Customers" and the second one says the same thing but good lord man I've already written two more lines of code while you're still typing the long one. Granted, with ReSharper that advantage disappears, however ...
For all we know, MVC4 might suddenly require that all names be preceded by exactly 4.7 spaces followed by lolcat ASCII art. Why? Because yes, that's why.
har.
How do the forefathers of object-oriented programming feel about our "advancement" of their art by adding a bunch of wishy-washy, do-sorta-whatever anonymous constructs while at the same time creating fragile dependencies on naming conventions?
Ok, so this was mostly just frustration, but I'll bite. The guys that started wanted simpler code (BASIC, COBOL look up what those mean) and so they want things to be easier and more math-y. That's where things are moving (LINQ is set math, and higher order calculus; also see F# and Python)
So they would LOVE what we're doing now. Getting away from procedural code (algebra) and moving into set-oriented logic (adv calculus). Also see Event Handlers ;-)
So .. having said all that: I've been in your shoes. I've asked those questions. I've studied at the feet of masters. I love where the languages are going.
In your next life, I want you to learn node.js. I want you to learn async evented processing, and I want you to understand how things don't rely on ANSI-C anymore. We've made a lot of progress in this industry, and things are looking up. Things are looking up every day. I love where we are, and I think it's the right thing for our industry.
Cheers, and HTH.

My answer: "because of the advancements in automated testing".

Programming hire test - Test a developers knowledge in C# / ASP.NET [closed]

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We're hiring a .NET developer soon, and I was assigned to create a test, which would take aprox: 1h to solve. A test which would test the programmers knowledge in (mainly) C# and ASP.NET.
This is what i've come up with so far:
Use project #1 to read data(HTML) from the specified URL and output all links(anchors) containing anchor name “xxxxxxxxx”. You are free to use 3rd party libraries. My main thought here was to test how the developer would go about solving the problem. For example:
Create a regex which would parse all the data needed.
Create a DOM-tree and use XPATH to find all anchor nodes.
Iterate the whole string and perform manual string compares.
Create a new solution where you demonstrate the usage of .NET masterpages.
Connect the solution to the ******** database. And output all customers from the “********_customers” table.
Create a new button which refreshes all users using AJAX.
Pretty basic stuff. Though, I also added the one below. Mainly to test the developers OO knowledge. Do you think this is too "overkill", or what kind of test would you suggest? If you were to hire a ASP.NET developer, what would your main focus be? ADO.NET? IO? string handling?
Create an interface/abstract class implementation demonstrating the functionallity of either the Factory, Factory Method, Command or Decorator pattern. You wont need to implement any functionallity, just use comments in your abstract class.
Thanks in advance!

The task you gave is essentially a day or two worth of coding if you want to have reasonably readable code. Within an hour I guess I would do it, but you'd have to read code that has cryptically named methods, unreadable regexes, weird callbacks, no error handling and overall is pretty darn ugly. Looking at it you would not hire me.
Before you give your question to candidates, first make sure that your peers/programmers can do it first. And that you can code it in less than 60 minutes in a way that would satisfy you.
That said, I do not know if test is the best choice for hiring anyone. A few interviewing bloggers wrote about their experience coming from conducting tons of interviews:
Guerilla Guide to Interviewing by Joel Spolksy
Truth about interviewing, Get that job at Google (and many others) by Steve Yegge
I totally agree with them. Having conducted about a gazillion of interviews myself, I find that asking basic technology related questions is not nearly as good as asking to implement a bit of recursion or pointers (if someone claims to know C/C++).
By hiring someone who understands recursion/algorithms you get a smart guy who can learn new technology. When you hire someone who knows how to connect to a database, who knows how to connect to a database but not necessarily qualified to do much more than that.
There are a few sources of good programming questions that are somewhere between coding and algorithms that may inspire you. They do not test .NET at all, but are very good indicator of smart programmers.
Top Coder
Google Code jam

Within 1 hour you can only test his programming skills, but it's not enough to write the code sample.
Take a look at this C# / ASP.NET MVC test:
http://tests4geeks.com/test/asp-net-mvc-c-sharp
After the applicant will pass the test and result will be good, then invite him to the interview and talk about his experience. Ask about most difficult features, that he implemented in his projects. In other words, you must understand, if he know and can do enough to take part in your project.
If you still want to ask him to write some code. That is some idea:
There are the students and subjects. Please ask to write 3 pages (asp .net mvc or web-forms). First and second - for editing the dictionary of students and subjects. Third form must contain be the table. The students are in left column. The subjects are in the top row. The marks are at the intersection. Each mark can be edited (text box) and saved. Saving could be implemented by clicking the common button "Save". Or it could save each cell automatically using the Ajax.
This is very simple example, but it would show you how user writes the code, what techniques does he use.

I would have thought that it would be better to simply create a test that would make it easy for you to put developers into different 'skill buckets'.
Why not have three or four sections or features that the developer must 'layer' features on top one another to show their programming and design skills.
Part 1: Implement x easy difficulty
features.
Part 2: Implement x medium difficulty
features.
Part 3: Implement x difficult
features.
Part 4: Implement x very difficult features.
And give the developer 1 hour to write the application. Make it realistic that they can implement the features in the given time frame.
As Joel and Jeff say on the Stackoverflow podcast, there is a direct correlation between developer skill and speed.
Think about the way exams are structured? We can all get 100% of the questions correct in any exam we sit if we had infinite time, but in 1 hour?
This way, If a developer takes your test and only implements features up to Section 2 in the time period, then you should have a safe indication that they are not suitable for the job. Section 3 features all done then they are good enough and section 4 complete would indicate that they are very experienced and a slight cut above the rest.
However I would also look at the overall polish that the developer has given to the code. If they implemented all features up to section 4, but poorly, then they are also not going to be someone you want. IF a developer only did up to section 3 but implemented everything very elegantly, then I would want to hire them.
I also think that 1 hour is perhaps a little too long. I would aim for 10-40 minutes obviously you may need to cut out section 4 that I proposed.

You should check
GeekInterview -- a good source for interview questions
There are hundreds of questions.

I think you would be much better off coming up with a single question that will allow you to see more than just development skills using your target technologies. Strong problem solving skills are as important as expertise in a specific technology stack.
I would even recommend that you explore the two aspects of a candidate in different parts of the process. I usually ask a bunch of questions about the technology stack we are using on our project to gauge the candidates level of knowledge as it relates to that stack.
Then I ask them a pure problem solving question and I allow them to use whichever technology they are most comfortable with to solve the problem (their choice of technology can be an important indicator).
I particularly like Graph Theory related problems. The candidates solutions will tell you a ton about how they approach, solve problems as well as how they validate their solutions.
As part of the problem solving portion of the interview you should be looking for:
Proper data structure design
Implementation of OO best practices
Proper solution (can they debug problems effectively... one great way to see this is do not allow them to use a computer, make them code on a whiteboard and debug in their heads)
Proper solution validation (do they come up with test cases)

My 2 cents:
We have a programming test in my company that is easy. Basically, you have to implement the listener pattern extending the ArrayList class, create unit tests for it (based on at least what we require), document the corner cases, document the program itself if you want to, and then send the test back to us.
A developer has 48 hours to complete that test. We ask for production quality in the test. We want to test the following items:
Was the developer smart enough to cover the corner cases?
Is the developer implementation of multi-threading satisfactory?
Are the unit tests good enough? Do they cover enough cases?
Is the code well written and documented? Will someone be able to maintain that code in the future?
Does he care about his code? Did he explain why he did "A" and not "B"?
I don't think short tests are capable of evaluating a developer. You may ask for a tool or technology that someone have not been using in the past months, and whoever is being tested for that technology will need sometime to get up to speed - but if a developer was working with that the day before, he will know by memory how to use it, and he/ she will seem smarter than the other developer, what may not be true.
But if you ask for something that is tricky and you are interviewing the developer, you can check how he is going to solve the problem - I don't think it really matters if he/ she cannot get the 100% right answer, as long as he/ she can talk about the problems that you found on the code and show that they actually understand whatever you explained to them.

In the past we have used problems from Google code jam. the problems in the early rounds are easier and they get gradually harder. They are kind of algorithmic in nature, you can solve them in whatever language you like. As they get harder there is often an obvious 'brute force' kind of answer that won't work because of the size of the data. So you have to think of something more optimal.

The first test you suggested should take 10min-40min for a basic dev - I would use a web-crawler I have in my library that converts HTML to XML then easily use Linq to XML.
I would test for lambda expressions, performance patterns maintain files, or writing an object to several files dynamically.
Maybe you would like to test unmanged code, pointers etc.
I donno, im just writing-jabbering while things are comin up to my mind, i wrote things that was hard for me to implement.

few days ago I was invited to pass C# programming test at skillbox website there was 30 questions quiz and 45 time to pass it. Below is some of them:
1) What will be printed by running the program?
#if DEBUG
Console.WriteLine("DEBUG");
#else
Console.WriteLine("RELEASE");
#endif
2) What will be the result of calling SomeMethod():
public static void SomeMethod()
{
string s1 = "a";
string s2 = "b";
Swap(ref s1, ref s2);
Console.WriteLine(s1);
Console.WriteLine(s2);
}
public static void Swap(ref Object a, ref Object b)
{
Object t = b;
b = a;
a = t;
}
Here is a link for reference, I think you can find more C# quezzes there http://skillbox.io

C# Console? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
Does anyone know if there is a c# Console app, similar to the Python or Ruby console? I know the whole "Compiled versus Interpreted" difference, but with C#'s reflection power I think it could be done.
UPDATE
Well, it only took about 200 lines, but I wrote a simple one...It works a lot like osql. You enter commands and then run them with go.
SharpConsole http://www.gfilter.net/junk/sharpconsole.jpg
If anyone wants it, let me know.

Given your mention of "C#'s reflection power", I am unsure whether you're looking for an interactive C# console for small code snippets of your own (à la Ruby's irb), or a means of interacting with an existing, compiled application currently running as a process.
In the former case:
Windows PowerShell might be your friend
Another candidate would be the C# shell
Finally, CSI, a Simple C# Interpreter

Found this on reddit: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Sep-08.html
Quote from the site:
The idea was simple: create an interactive C# shell by altering the compiler to generate and execute code dynamically as opposed to merely generating static code.

If you don't have to use the console, and just want a place to test some ad hoc C# snippets, then LinqPad is a good option. I find it very cool/easy to use.

I am not sure what you are looking for this application to accomplish. If it is just to try some code without having to create a project and all the overhead to just test an idea, then SnippetCompiler could be a good fit.
I just wanted to give you another option.

It appears Miguel De Icaza was stalking me:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Sep-08.html

Google reveals a few efforts at this. One in particular illustrates why this is less straightforward than it might seem. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/csi.aspx has a basic interpreter using .NET's built in ability to compile c# code. A key problem is that the author's approach creates a new mini .NET assembly for each interpreted line. C# may have the reflective power to have a python or ruby style console, but the .NET framework libraries are geared toward compiling C#, not dynamically interpreting it. If you are serious about this, you may want to look at http://www.paxscript.net/, which seems like a genuine attempt at interpreted C#.

I believe you are looking for Snippy =)

Develop Reference

C# (C-Sharp) is a programming language developed by Microsoft that runs on the .NET Framework.