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Friday, January 29, 2010

Scott Hanselman's ASP.NET Interview Questions

I do a LOT of interviewing here, and for a while we were hiring ASP.NET people.  Here's some of the questions that I asked them.  I came up with these questions because you'd "just know" this stuff if you spent time working on a REAL WORLD ASP.NET site - through design, development, debugging, production debugging, and deployment.

Do they suck? Did I miss any?  How do you think people did?

  • From constructor to destructor (taking into consideration Dispose() and the concept of non-deterministic finalization), what the are events fired as part of the ASP.NET System.Web.UI.Page lifecycle. Why are they important? What interesting things can you do at each?
  • What are ASHX files?  What are HttpHandlers?  Where can they be configured?
  • What is needed to configure a new extension for use in ASP.NET? For example, what if I wanted my system to serve ASPX files with a *.jsp extension?
  • What events fire when binding data to a data grid? What are they good for?
  • Explain how PostBacks work, on both the client-side and server-side. How do I chain my own JavaScript into the client side without losing PostBack functionality?
  • How does ViewState work and why is it either useful or evil?
  • What is the OO relationship between an ASPX page and its CS/VB code behind file in ASP.NET 1.1? in 2.0?
  • What happens from the point an HTTP request is received on a TCP/IP port up until the Page fires the On_Load event?
  • How does IIS communicate at runtime with ASP.NET?  Where is ASP.NET at runtime in IIS5? IIS6?
  • What is an assembly binding redirect? Where are the places an administrator or developer can affect how assembly binding policy is applied?
  • Compare and contrast LoadLibrary(), CoCreateInstance(), CreateObject() and Assembly.Load().

-Scott Hanselman's