This was a contract position at Microsoft's Hardware Software Team. I was contacted through a staffing agency I worked with.

First, I received some screening questions, such as:

• Create a class Shape and two derived classes, Rectangle and Triangle. All of them should implement a method called edgeCount().
• Suppose you have a C++ base class and several classes that inherit from it. What might happen if you do not write a virtual destructor for the base class?
• Provide a robust function that accepts an array of integers and its length. The function should find the two largest even integers in the array, multiply them together, and return the result.

Then, I was invited for a series of three 1:1 interviews at their location, asking typical Microsoft interview questions. These included finding duplicate items in unsorted lists, plus some SQL questions like how to list all addresses for all customers and how joins work between tables.

For skills, it's best to know them and refresh some knowledge. Scan through a book on the subject and review anything you might not know or have always found difficult in a particular area (like types of locks and locking levels in SQL).

For algorithms, it would be a good idea to browse through computational complexity information for common data structures and algorithms (hashtables, binary trees) and try out some common questions (see http://www.careercup.com/).

Also, be confident and show your real interest in the job. I might have shown I wasn't so interested in that position, since I was looking for something a bit different. Now I am still looking and wondering whether I should have shown more enthusiasm for their work.

Suppose you have a C++ base class and several classes that inherit from it.

What might happen if you do not write a virtual destructor for the base class?