Steps To Interview .NET Developer And Q&A Guide To Keep Up With

This article will tell you more about skills gradation of .NET developers, how to prepare to interview, and what soft and hard skills questions you may ask programmers to find out their level and qualities. Enjoy an article!

For a start, we will list levels of .NET developers and what obligations each developer should fulfill on their level.

First, let’s clarify some important issues you need to know about. There are basic skills required for .NET developer which all .NET developers should acquire by default since they won’t be able to perform their tasks properly. However, there is no specific set of skills which junior only or senior only masters. Everything depends on the project requirements, on a team and company developers work at, so skill set may vary.

Basic full-stack .NET developer skills are the following:

• Languages: C#, Visual Basic .NET, F#
• Web frameworks: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET API,
• ORM: Entity Framework, NHibernate
• IoC container: Castle Windsor Container, Unity, Structure Map
• Databases: MySQL, MS SQL
• Front-end technologies: .NET Razor Engine, HTML 5, CSS 3, JS tools, Twitter Bootstrap

Note: Although .NET developers should also know how to build front-end, the main purpose of .NET programmers is server-side development, back-end. Their main focus is to create a reliable foundation for software functionality, so back-end skills should always prevail. However, .NET developer skills list can be unlimited. Besides that, . Net developer key skills also include the development of desktop apps.

Before you start looking for a perfect .NET developer and ask them a bunch of advanced dot net interview questions, you need to prepare a list of important things to consider which will help you make the right choice and understand what specialist you are looking for.

This tip needs to be clarified: you should provide a mentor only if you are looking for a junior .NET developer. If you want to hire a developer that will acquire new skills and will adapt to technological particularities of your team, you need to provide a newbie with a mentor who will help and teach a new team member, assist in bug fixing, and so on.

For example, at Cleveroad we give a good foundation and basics for building a correct way of thinking, and we have the right approach to each developer. Sometimes experienced developers which became our employees had a rather chaotic experience before, they had no code review, they had no proper steps of self-development - and their skill level may be evaluated as a junior dev. We let a new developer immerse in software structure, understand code and architecture, anticipate what consequences may be after each action. Thus, we increase the level of developers and software quality.

You need to look for a motivated candidate only who knows what he or she wants. It will be much easier for you to work with this employee, and they will strive for permanent learning, keeping up with all updates in the world of .NET development. You need to find a potential candidate who will remain your employee not for a month, but for 2-3 years at least. And also motivated candidate will solve all challenges he or she faces since they want to be competitive.

If you are looking for an experienced and skilled developer, you need to compose a list of skills for a potential candidate. It is recommended to find specialists that use contemporary technologies and applied them during their previous employment. They should be acquainted with all contemporary IT tendencies. In addition, it is important for a candidate to have a few projects at least at portfolio since a candidate could participate in the development of only one project, and he or she masters only one tech stack. Our specialists at Cleveroad recommend developers to change activity direction every six months to diversify and improve knowledge and skills.

A technical test is a perfect option to select candidate prior to a personal interview. First, during a technical test fulfillment, you can see whether a candidate has an analytical mind, how they can analyze your requirements, whether they follow common standards of code writing and code-style. It doesn’t mean that a test should be complicated. It will be enough to see a couple of task solutions to understand how good candidates are at their field. Besides that, it is important to understand whether a candidate is skilled at task decomposition - how properly they divide tasks to implement them in the correct order.

This point can be referred to point № 3 - find out the motivation of a candidate. You can find potential employees on programming conferences and meetups since all passionate developers tend to attend such events where they can find out about new trends and gain new acquaintances. Thus, it is the last but not the least tip you should consider when you need to find a .NET developer for your project.

So, you just need to determine your requirements and it will help you avoid non-motivated and apathetic employees.

To select the best of the best, you need to test a developer’s hard skills and see their skill level. So you will have to ask developers some special .NET interview questions which will help you find out how good .NET developer technical skills are. We will start with basic questions which you can use to interview junior .NET developer. You can find a full list of questions and answers if you click on the picture below.

• Mention what is unchecked keyword?
• The entry point in the program, where and when it exists?
• String and StringBuilder their main differences?
• Mention what are out and ref keywords?
• ValueType and ReferenceType their main differences?
• OOP basic principles?
• Abstract class and Interface their main differences between?
• Mention what is .NET Namespaces?
• Mention what is MSIL in .NET ?
• Mention what are the functions .NET Assembly performs?
• Mention what is .Net Assembly Manifest?

Then, if you want to hire an experienced programmer of middle or senior level, you may ask them .NET technical interview questions. that will require more detailed answers and large technical experience.

• SOLID principles
• Design patterns
• EF Core
• Validation
• JWT token
• Async/await
• Exceptions
• LINQ
• Reflection
• Identity server
• Explain the ASP.NET page life cycle in brief. ASP.NET goes through a series of stages in the life cycle of each page.
• What is view state in ASP.NET?
• What’s the difference between Server.Transfer and Response.Redirect.
• What are the ASP.NET session state modes?
• List some different ASP.NET validators
• Explain the difference between Task and Thread in .NET

These questions may seem are too common and useless, but in fact, they are not less important. Why? The matter is that soft skills testing let you see the qualities of a developer, how they can manage the project, settle disputes, how stressful they are, and so on.

• Teamwork
• Ability to take criticism
• Response to specific actions
• Adaptability
• Communication skills
• Conflict management
• Creativity
• Decision making
• Dedication

All these .NET interview questions and answers may become a final decision that you will make when you need to select an appropriate candidate.

Our .NET team includes 6 developers at the moment - 3 junior devs, 2 middle devs, and 2 senior devs.

Senior developers have experience in the development of large projects that took more than 1 year of development. For example, Fisheryreports - a service for true anglers that like to fish.

However, as we noted above, we apply an individual approach to each specialist to let them grow and increase their skill level, so our junior .NET developers are engaged in the implementation of tasks of different levels of complexity.

As for tech stack and settled development patterns, we keep up with 2 following architectures.

Monolith architecture

This architecture means that your software works like a large connected module where all components are designed to work with each other, monolith architecture uses joint memory and resources. Its pros include that many apps use one typical functionality, it is good for small and mid-sized projects, it has high performance. However, it is inappropriate for large projects since monolith may be imagined as one building where everything is stored. And if you try to change something in one block, it may have an adverse effect on another block and damage the whole software with the chain reaction. That is where monolith architecture can be replaced with microservice architecture.

Microservice architecture

Using microservice architecture, it is possible to divide software into many blocks, and if it is required to change something in one block, other blocks will remain untouched and their functionality won’t be damaged. Microservices are organized better in an architectural sense since each service performs a specific task and it doesn’t depend on other components. Services that are not tied with each other can be modified and changed easier. Also, performance may be much higher than in monolith architecture since developers can isolate problematic parts in software and scale them regardless of rest parts. This architecture is suitable for large and complex projects. Our developers use two technologies in microservice architecture - domain-driven design (DDD) and command query responsibility segregation (CQRS).

Cleveroad is a professional custom mobile and web development company with more than 10 years of marketing experience. For such a long time we've helped many businesses acquire new technologies in various domains that now boost their internal processes and overall performance.

Cleveroad in numbers:

• 10+ years on the market
• 120+ in-house engineers
• 170+ successful projects
• 8+ expertise industries

For those enterprises that lack certain specialists we provide services that help them acquire needed programmers to their teams. We work with dedicated team model that allow businesses hire certain specialists for set period to achieve needed results. Just tell us about your project and we'll assemble a perfect team for you.