C# – Programming hire test – Test a developers knowledge in C# / ASP.NET

asp.netc++testing

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!

Best Solution

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.

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common

.net – ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application

Website:

The Web Site project is compiled on the fly. You end up with a lot more DLL files, which can be a pain. It also gives problems when you have pages or controls in one directory that need to reference pages and controls in another directory since the other directory may not be compiled into the code yet. Another problem can be in publishing.

If Visual Studio isn't told to re-use the same names constantly, it will come up with new names for the DLL files generated by pages all the time. That can lead to having several close copies of DLL files containing the same class name, which will generate plenty of errors. The Web Site project was introduced with Visual Studio 2005, but it has turned out not to be popular.

Web Application:

The Web Application Project was created as an add-in and now exists as part of SP 1 for Visual Studio 2005. The main differences are the Web Application Project was designed to work similarly to the Web projects that shipped with Visual Studio 2003. It will compile the application into a single DLL file at build time. To update the project, it must be recompiled and the DLL file published for changes to occur.

Another nice feature of the Web Application project is it's much easier to exclude files from the project view. In the Web Site project, each file that you exclude is renamed with an excluded keyword in the filename. In the Web Application Project, the project just keeps track of which files to include/exclude from the project view without renaming them, making things much tidier.

Reference

The article ASP.NET 2.0 - Web Site vs Web Application project also gives reasons on why to use one and not the other. Here is an excerpt of it:

You need to migrate large Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to VS 2005? use the Web Application project.

You want to open and edit any directory as a Web project without creating a project file? use Web Site project.

You need to add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation? use Web Application project.

You need to build a Web application using multiple Web projects? use the Web Application project.

You want to generate one assembly for each page? use the Web Site project.

You prefer dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view? use Web Site project.

You prefer single-page code model to code-behind model? use Web Site project.

Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects (MSDN) explains the differences between the web site and web application projects. Also, it discusses the configuration to be made in Visual Studio.