.Net Interview Questions and Answers 8

Advantages of migrating to VB.NET ?
Visual Basic .NET has many new and improved language features — such as inheritance, interfaces, and overloading that make it a powerful object-oriented programming language. As a Visual Basic developer, you can now create multithreaded, scalable applications using explicit multithreading. Other new language features in Visual Basic .NET include structured exception handling, custom attributes, and common language specification (CLS) compliance.

The CLS is a set of rules that standardizes such things as data types and how objects are exposed and interoperate. Visual Basic .NET adds several features that take advantage of the CLS. Any CLS-compliant language can use the classes, objects, and components you create in Visual Basic .NET. And you, as a Visual Basic user, can access classes, components, and objects from other CLS-compliant programming languages without worrying about language-specific differences such as data types.

CLS features used by Visual Basic .NET programs include assemblies, namespaces, and attributes.

These are the new features to be stated briefly:
Inheritance
Visual Basic .NET supports inheritance by allowing you to define classes that serve as the basis for derived classes. Derived classes inherit and can extend the properties and methods of the base class. They can also override inherited methods with new implementations. All classes created with Visual Basic .NET are inheritable by default. Because the forms you design are really classes, you can use inheritance to define new forms based on existing ones.

Exception Handling
Visual Basic .NET supports structured exception handling, using an enhanced version of the Try...Catch...Finally syntax supported by other languages such as C++.

Structured exception handling combines a modern control structure (similar to Select Case or While) with exceptions, protected blocks of code, and filters. Structured exception handling makes it easy to create and maintain programs with robust, comprehensive error handlers.

Overloading
Overloading is the ability to define properties, methods, or procedures that have the same name but use different data types. Overloaded procedures allow you to provide as many implementations as necessary to handle different kinds of data, while giving the appearance of a single, versatile procedure. Overriding Properties and Methods The Overrides keyword allows derived objects to override characteristics inherited from parent objects. Overridden members have the same arguments as the members inherited from the base class, but different implementations. A member's new implementation can call the original implementation in the parent class by preceding the member name with MyBase.

Constructors and Destructors
Constructors are procedures that control initialization of new instances of a class. Conversely, destructors are methods that free system resources when a class leaves scope or is set to Nothing. Visual Basic .NET supports constructors and destructors using the Sub New and Sub Finalize procedures.

Data Types
Visual Basic .NET introduces three new data types. The Char data type is an unsigned 16-bit quantity used to store Unicode characters. It is equivalent to the .NET Framework System. Char data type. The Short data type, a signed 16-bit integer, was named Integer in earlier versions of Visual Basic. The Decimal data type is a 96-bit signed integer scaled by a variable power of 10. In earlier versions of Visual Basic, it was available only within a Variant.

Interfaces
Interfaces describe the properties and methods of classes, but unlike classes, do not provide implementations. The Interface statement allows you to declare interfaces, while the Implements statement lets you write code that puts the items described in the interface into practice.

Delegates
Delegates objects that can call the methods of objects on your behalf are sometimes described as type-safe, object-oriented function pointers. You can use delegates to let procedures specify an event handler method that runs when an event occurs. You can also use delegates with multithreaded applications. For details, see Delegates and the AddressOf Operator.

Shared Members
Shared members are properties, procedures, and fields that are shared by all instances of a class. Shared data members are useful when multiple objects need to use information that is common to all. Shared class methods can be used without first creating an object from a class.

References
References allow you to use objects defined in other assemblies. In Visual Basic .NET, references point to assemblies instead of type libraries. For details, see References and the Imports Statement. Namespaces prevent naming conflicts by organizing classes, interfaces, and methods into hierarchies.

Assemblies
Assemblies replace and extend the capabilities of type libraries by, describing all the required files for a particular component or application. An assembly can contain one or more namespaces.

Attributes
Attributes enable you to provide additional information about program elements. For example, you can use an attribute to specify which methods in a class should be exposed when the class is used as a XML Web service.
Multithreading
Visual Basic .NET allows you to write applications that can perform multiple tasks independently. A task that has the potential of holding up other tasks can execute on a separate thread, a process known as multithreading. By causing complicated tasks to run on threads that are separate from your user interface, multithreading makes your applications more responsive to user input.

Using ActiveX Control in .Net
ActiveX control is a special type of COM component that supports a User Interface. Using ActiveX Control in your .Net Project is even easier than using COM component. They are bundled usually in .ocx files. Again a proxy assembly is made by .Net utility AxImp.exe (which we will see shortly) which your application (or client) uses as if it is a .Net control or assembly.

Making Proxy Assembly For ActiveX Control: First, a proxy assembly is made using AxImp.exe (acronym for ActiveX Import) by writing following command on Command Prompt:

C:> AxImp C:MyProjectsMyControl.ocx
This command will make two dlls, e.g., in case of above command

MyControl.dll
AxMyControl.dll
The first file MyControl.dll is a .Net assembly proxy, which allows you to reference the ActiveX as if it were non-graphical object.

The second file AxMyControl.dll is the Windows Control, which allows u to use the graphical aspects of activex control and use it in the Windows Form Project.

Adding Reference of ActiveX Proxy Assembly in your Project Settings: To add a reference of ActiveX Proxy Assembly in our Project, do this:

o Select Project A Add Reference (Select Add Reference from Project Menu).
o This will show you a dialog box, select .Net tab from the top of window.
o Click Browse button on the top right of window.
o Select the dll file for your ActiveX Proxy Assembly (which is MyControl.dll) and click OK o Your selected component is now shown in the ‘Selected Component’ List Box. Click OK again Some More On Using COM or ActiveX in .Net


.Net only provides wrapper class or proxy assembly (Runtime Callable Wrapper or RCW) for COM or activeX control. In the background, it is actually delegating the tasks to the original COM, so it does not convert your COM/activeX but just imports them.

A good thing about .Net is that when it imports a component, it also imports the components that are publically referenced by that component. So, if your component, say MyDataAcsess.dll references ADODB.dll then .Net will automatically import that COM component too!

The Visual Studio.NET does surprise you in a great deal when u see that it is applying its intellisense (showing methods, classes, interfaces, properties when placing dot) even on your imported COM components!!!! Isn’t it a magic or what?

When accessing thru RCW, .Net client has no knowledge that it is using COM component, it is presented just as another C# assembly.

U can also import COM component thru command prompt (for reference see Professional C# by Wrox)

U can also use your .Net components in COM, i.e., export your .net components (for reference see Professional C# by Wrox)

What is Machine.config?
Machine configuration file: The machine.config file contains settings that apply to the entire computer. This file is located in the %runtime install path%Config directory. There is only one machine.config file on a computer. The Machine.Config file found in the "CONFIG" subfolder of your .NET Framework install directory (c:WINNTMicrosoft.NETFramework{Version Number} CONFIG on Windows 2000 installations). The machine.config, which can be found in the directory $WINDIR$Microsoft.NETFrameworkv1.0.3705CONFIG, is an XML-formatted configuration file that specifies configuration options for the machine. This file contains, among many other XML elements, a browser Caps element. Inside this element are a number of other elements that specify parse rules for the various User-Agents, and what properties each of these parsing supports.

For example, to determine what platform is used, a filter element is used that specifies how to set the platform property based on what platform name is found in the User-Agent string. Specifically, the machine.config file contains:

platform=Win95
platform=Win98
platform=WinNT
...


That is, if in the User-Agent string the string "Windows 95" or "Win95" is found, the platform property is set to Win95. There are a number of filter elements in the browserCaps element in the machine.config file that define the various properties for various User-Agent strings.

Hence, when using the Request.Browser property to determine a user's browser features, the user's agent string is matched up to particular properties in the machine.config file. The ability for being able to detect a user's browser's capabilities, then, is based upon the honesty in the browser's sent User-Agent string. For example, Opera can be easily configured to send a User-Agent string that makes it appear as if it's IE 5.5. In this case from the Web server's perspective (and, hence, from your ASP.NET Web page's perspective), the user is visiting using IE 5.5, even though, in actuality, he is using Opera.

What is Web.config?
In classic ASP all Web site related information was stored in the metadata of IIS. This had the disadvantage that remote Web developers couldn't easily make Web-site configuration changes. For example, if you want to add a custom 404 error page, a setting needs to be made through the IIS admin tool, and you're Web host will likely charge you a flat fee to do this for you. With ASP.NET, however, these settings are moved into an XML-formatted text file (Web.config) that resides in the Web site's root directory. Through Web.config you can specify settings like custom 404 error pages, authentication and authorization settings for the Web sitempilation options for the ASP.NET Web pages, if tracing should be enabled, etc.
The Web.config file is an XML-formatted file. At the root level is the tag. Inside this tag you can add a number of other tags, the most common and useful one being the system.web tag, where you will specify most of the Web site configuration parameters. However, to specify application-wide settings you use the tag.

For example, if we wanted to add a database connection string parameter we could have a Web.config file like so.

What is the difference between ADO and ADO.NET?
ADO uses Recordsets and cursors to access and modify data. Because of its inherent design, Recordset can impact performance on the server side by tying up valuable resources. In addition, COM marshalling - an expensive data conversion process - is needed to transmit a Recordset. ADO.NET addresses three important needs that ADO doesn't address:

1. Providing a comprehensive disconnected data-access model, which is crucial to the Web environment
2. Providing tight integration with XML, and
3. Providing seamless integration with the .NET Framework (e.g., compatibility with the base class library's type system). From an ADO.NET implementation perspective, the Recordset object in ADO is eliminated in the .NET architecture. In its place, ADO.NET has several dedicated objects led by the DataSet object and including the DataAdapter, and DataReader objects to perform specific tasks. In addition, ADO.NET DataSets operate in disconnected state whereas the ADO RecordSet objects operated in a fully connected state.

In ADO, the in-memory representation of data is the RecordSet. In ADO.NET, it is the dataset. A RecordSet looks like a single table. If a RecordSet is to contain data from multiple database tables, it must use a JOIN query, which assembles the data from the various database tables into a single result table. In contrast, a dataset is a collection of one or more tables. The tables within a dataset are called data tables; specifically, they are DataTable objects. If a dataset contains data from multiple database tables, it will typically contain multiple DataTable objects. That is, each DataTable object typically corresponds to a single database table or view. In this way, a dataset can mimic the structure of the underlying database.

In ADO you scan sequentially through the rows of the RecordSet using the ADO MoveNext method. In ADO.NET, rows are represented as collections, so you can loop through a table as you would through any collection, or access particular rows via ordinal or primary key index. A cursor is a database element that controls record navigation, the ability to update data, and the visibility of changes made to the database by other users. ADO.NET does not have an inherent cursor object, but instead includes data classes that provide the functionality of a traditional cursor. For example, the functionality of a forward-only, read-only cursor is available in the ADO.NET DataReader object.

There is one significant difference between disconnected processing in ADO and ADO.NET. In ADO you communicate with the database by making calls to an OLE DB provider. In ADO.NET you communicate with the database through a data adapter (an OleDbDataAdapter, SqlDataAdapter, OdbcDataAdapter, or OracleDataAdapter object), which makes calls to an OLE DB provider or the APIs provided by the underlying data source.