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Microsoft Placement Paper

These were the questions they asked me in the campus -


1st interview
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1) Find the least common ancestor in a binary tree, given any two nodes
of the tree.

2)* Write code to remove duplicates in a sorted array

3) What are the different test cases for the previous program

4)* You have a 7 kg gold bar. You have to give 1kg of gold to a person
working under you. But you are allowed to cut the gold bar only twice.
How do you do this?


2nd interview
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1)* You have a register ( say 8 bit one). All writes to the register go
through a filter, which is actually a mask. So the write happens only
in the bits of the register only if the corresponding bit in the mask
is a 1. Otherwise, the register retains its old contents. The reads to
the register are straight forward. It returns the contents of the register.
Now, find the contents of the Mask.

2)* Find whether a number is a power of two or not (in a single instn,
no loop ).

3) Write a function in C to convert a int number into a string.
You have to consider both the positive and negative numbers.
Again what are the test cases for the previous program.

4) You have a big screen array containing pixel values at each points.
You want to implement cut and paste functionality, of a rectangular
sub-block from one place to other inside this big block.
How do you go about implementing such a function?
He wanted me to start from the prototype of such a function,
necessary parameters, analyse all the conditions,
And how to classify into different categories, and what shud
be done in the final code.

5) Difference b/n semaphore, mutex and critical section.

6) Another design question. Using OO and C++ concepts.
Design a window interface, with tha class, member and method descriptions
and the interacions b/n different classes.
The Window interface has Menu, list box, combo box and such thins, and each
of them has one or more text patters, with color and fonts associated with
it along with other properties like size etc. Also there can be container
classes, which can contain one or more of the basic classes and/or other
container class itself. Finally, there is different sorts of layouts that
can be done as in html, ranging from simple sequential layout, or
North-South-East-West layout etc.

7) Still with OO, Can the destructor be virtual? if yes, what is its use.

3rd interview
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1) You have a machine which can do only multiply by 2, divide by 2 and
Addition of 2 numbers. Write a detailed algorithm to multiply any two
numbers, in this kind of a machine.

2)* You have a character sets containing 1 byte ( say ascii ) character and
2 byte ( say japanese ) character. The ascii character can be
identified by the fact that it has MSB 0. The japanese character
has MSB 1 and spans across 2 bytes. Now you have a string containing both
ascii and japanese characters, and a pointer to a character, somewhere in
middle of the string is given, Write a comple code to remove the character
just before the given pointer ( that character may be either japanese or
ascii ). You are also given the start of the string and the string is
null terminated.