Screening C# Candidates: Let's Play 20 Questions

Over the past year I was involved in the process of interviewing candidates for both mid and senior level developer positions. We would bring them in for a face-to-face interview, sometimes with multiple interviewers, only to find out they were unable to answer the most basic technical questions concerning C# and .NET. I’m of the persuasion that every .NET developer should understand basic concepts, such as C# language syntax, inheritance, generics, memory management, threading, etc. Without such an understanding, a developer can end up writing apps that are shot-through with problems that make the code difficult to debug and maintain.