Microsoft MSN interview questions

Compare and contrast SQL Server with MySQL.

Compare and contrast stored procedures and dynamic SQL.

Describe a standard 3-tier architecture and the interfaces between each tier.

Compare and contrast a rich client and browser-based web application

Compare and contrast WS and remoting protocols.

Design the data structures for the game battleship.

Consider the Dead Sea Scrolls. Imagine that you have these torn up old shreds of paper with ancient words on them. You want to develop an application that will display one sheet at a time on the screen. When the user left-clicks a word, the page containing the previous occurence of that word is displayed and the word is highlighted. When the user right-clicks a word, the page containing the next occurence is displayed and the word is highlighted. When the user double-clicks a word, the definition is displayed. How would you design the application?

Given an array of the counties in NY represented as arrays of line segments, find the collection of line segments which represent the outline of the state.

Consider an SOA rich-client application used by several international vendors, where one vendor sees bandwidth usage

far exceeding what would be expected based on their usage. What steps would you follow to debug the problem?

Imagine a trainyard. The purpose of a trainyard is to reorder trains so that they are most efficiently grouped for outbound travel. The basic unit of a trainyard is a piece of track which looks like the figure below. The train operator can perform three operations: move a car from the source to the spur, from the source to the destination, or from the spur to the destination. So, for example, he could reverse a train by moving each car onto the spur and then moving each car onto the destination. Write a function which, given an array of integers representing the order of cars on the source, and another representing the order of cars desired on the destination, prints instructions telling the trainyard operator which operations to perform to reorder the train correctly.

Implement a function which, given the integer value of the hours and minutes hands of a clock, returns the measure of the degrees between them.

Find the lowest valued node in a Binary Search Tree (BST) greater than or equal to a a certain value.

Verify that a given BST is valid.

Given the following database table, which represents the history of user account statuses, give the query that returns the users which had a certain status on a certain day.

Implement the datastructures for a Tree and a function to populate it based off a page of text.