Interview questions

I've been asked the same questions during interviews in the past. The two that come to mind are:

1. What's the difference between a clustered and non-clustered index in SQL Server?
2. What's the virtual keyword in C# mean?

I finally got around to looking up the answer to the second question. I generally don't override methods, so I've never had much use for it.

The short of it is that virtual is required if you want to override a method of the base class. If you don't supply virtual, the best you can do is use the new keyword to create a completely new method that just happens to have the same name of a method in the base class. To take it a bit further, sealed will prevent any further overriding down the inheritance chain. Therefore;

1. a base class may have a method with virtual assigned to it;
2. deriving from 1, you could override the method;
3. deriving 2, you could sealed override the method;
4. deriving 3, you can't override any more (but you could new the method);

Is this an important question? Not in-itself. I was offered the jobs without knowing the answer.

I have written an example gist to further clarify.