IIS and .NET 2.0 interview questions

I had a 2 hour layover and was browsing the newsgroups.  A person posted a question wondering about interview questions regarding IIS and .NET 2.0.  I’m sure there are many other questions that I didn’t think to ask, here is the list I came up with.  If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the comments and I’ll update the thread.


PS: This is meant for a ‘systems’ or ‘itpro’ type person and not necessarily a developer type individual.


General IIS related questions




  • How do you isolate and troubleshoot an ASP and / or ASP.NET application?


  • What is your idea of locking down a server?


  • How do you feel about having developers or anyone else making changes directly in production?  Aka how do you normally handle change management.


  • What perfmon counters do you find useful in troubleshooting an IIS or related problem.


  • Do you have experience in working with web-farms, load-balancing environments?


  • What is your ideal way of handling content.  Remote Storage / NAS (network attached storage) vs. local content and replication.  If you use local content and replication what tools do you to use?


  • Are you familiar with DFS?


  • What debugging tools do you use for IIS?


  • What / Where would you put global .NET settings.  How would you lock them down?


  • Do you have any experience with SSL certificates?


  • Do you have experience with machines with multiple IP’s and how to handle several sites / applications on a machine.


  • What is your preference of handling machine accounts?  Do you like local vs. Active Directory based accounts.


  • Do you have experience with working in an AD environment that supports IIS.


  • Do you have experience with NLB (network load balancing) that comes with IIS.


  • How do you monitor the applications / sites to ensure the uptime is appropriate.  This might apply more to a monitoring environment, but it is good to know what to monitor.


  • Are you familiar with compression and the benefits.


  • Do you know what MIME types are for?


  • Do you know how to list all running applications on a server to determine which application pools are owned by what sites. (IISAPP)


  • Are you familiar with IISState, IIS Debug Diag. SSL Diag, SMTPDiag in the resource kit.


  • What tools do you use or have experience in load-testing an application.


  • What are some of the tools provided by MS.  WCAT, TinyGet, WAST.


  • Do you know how to configure host-headers and how they related to DNS.


  • What is your backup and recovery strategy for IIS


  • How would you handle migrating to another box?


  • How do you handle changes in IIS, scripting or manual changes?


  • Are you familiar with scripting languages such as VBScript, JScript, Powershell.


  • Are you familiar with IISCfg and related scripts such as adsutil


  • Do you have experience supporting multiple environments of IIS (different domains, dev / test /integration / production)


  • Are you familiar with ways to connect to remote databases such as db2, oracle, sql server


  • Do you know the differences between anonymous, integrated, basic, digest authentication.


  • What is your preferred method of publishing content?  FTP? FrontPage? WebDAV? Folder copy? Publish to a staging machine and replicate to the content source either on a nas or individual nodes.


  • Are you familiar with the other services in SMTP, FTP?


  • Do you know how to configure a smarthost?


  • Does the built-in FTP service support host-headers?


  • Do you know the benefits of using a COM+ package vs. Regsvr32


  • What certain local group is necessary if it is configured as a application pool user.


  • Do you know how to check a COM+ component to ensure it will not leak memory.

.NET 2.0




  • Can you run the 1.1 and 2.0 on the same box?  What are the limitations.


  • Can you explain what the ‘/bin’  folder is used for.


  • Do you know what user instancing is.


  • Do you know the difference between precompiled applications and publishing the source code.


  • Do you have any experience with partial trust or CAS (code access security)


  • What types of things cause an appdomain or application pool recycle.


  • What are the new folders in .NET 2.0 and what are they used for.


  • How / why does the machine key need to be the same across all machines in a web-farm.

IIS7




  • What makes the IUSR account unique in IIS7 vs. previous versions.


  • What are some of the new ways of troubleshooting, Logging in IIS7


  • What are the major benefits of IIS7?  (FREB, Integrated Pipeline, IUSR same on all w2k8 boxes, Shared configuration, Modular architecture, configuration changes

9 thoughts on “IIS and .NET 2.0 interview questions”

  7. Marco Shaw

    Super cool. How about a series of posts answering some of these? I haven’t been too much into IIS since 5.0, so anything brief on 6 and 7 would be appreciated.

  9. Jawahar Adityan

    The Answers to most of the questions are answered in my blog..Thanks for the questions admin 🙂 Cheers

    iisadmins.blogspot.in

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