Friday, March 27, 2009

OOPS Interview Questions Part 1

Question: What is Encapsulation? 
Answer: Encapsulation - is the ability of an object to hide its data and methods from the rest of the world. It is one of the fundamental principles of OOPs. 
Say we create a class, named Calculations. This class may contain a few members in the form of properties, events, fields or methods. Once the class is created, we may instantiate the class by creating an object out of it. The object acts as an instance of this class, the members of the class are not exposed to the outer world directly, rather, they are encapsulated by the class. 
Example:
Public class Calculations
{
private void fnMultiply(int x, int y)
{
return x * y;
}
}
...
...
Calculations obj;
int Result;
Result = obj.fnMultiply(5,10); 

Question: What is Class? 
Answer: A class is an organized store-house in object-oriented programming that gives coherent functional abilities to a group of related code. It is the definition of an object, made up of software code. Using classes, we may wrap data and behaviour together (Encapsulation). We may define classes in terms of classes (Inheritance). We can also override the behaviour of a class using an alternate behaviour (Polymorphism).
A Base Class is a class that is inherited by another class. In .NET, a class may inherit from only one class. 

Question: What is inheritance? 
Answer: Inheritance - is the concept of passing the traits of a class to another class. 
A class comprises of a collection of types of encapsulated instance variables and types of methods, events, properties, possibly with implementation of those types together with a constructor function that can be used to create objects of the class. A class is a cohesive package that comprises of a particular kind of compile-time metadata. A Class describes the rules by which objects behave; these objects are referred to as "instances" of that class. (Reference)

Classes can inherit from another class. This is accomplished by putting a colon after the class name when declaring the class, and naming the class to inherit from—the base class—after the colon.

Question: What is a class member? What is an object? 
Answer: The entities like events, properties, fields and functions encapsulated within a class are called class members. A constructor of a class that resides within it is also a form of a class member. 

When we instantiate a class in order to use its encapsulated class members, this instantiated class entity is called the object. 

Question: Whats the difference between a class and an object? 
Answer: In any object Oriented language, an object is the backbone of everything that we see. A class is a blueprint that describes how an instance of it (object) will behave. To create a class, we define it in a "Code File", with an extension *.cs or *.vb. We make use of the keyword class. 
Example
Lets create a class named Laptop
public class Laptop
{
private string sbrand;
public Laptop() {}
public Laptop(string name)
{
sbrand = name;
}
}

From our code that references this class, we write...
Laptop lp = new Laptop("Lenovo"); //Passing a variable to the class constructor
Once the class object is created, the object may be used to invoke the member functions defined within the class. We may allocate any number of objects using the new keyword. The new keyword returns a reference to an object on the heap. This reference is not to the actual object itself. The variable being refered is stored on a stack for usage in the application. When we allocate an object to a heap, its managed by the .NET runtime. The garbage collector takes care of the object by removing it from the heap, when it is no longer reachable by any part of the code. 

Question: What is polymorphism? 
Answer: Polymorphism means allowing a single definition to be used with different types of data (specifically, different classes of objects). For example, a polymorphic function definition can replace several type-specific ones, and a single polymorphic operator can act in expressions of various types. Many programming languages implement some forms of polymorphism. 

The concept of polymorphism applies to data types in addition to functions. A function that can evaluate to and be applied to values of different types is known as a polymorphic function. A data type that contains elements of different types is known as a polymorphic data type. 

Polymorphism may be achieved by overloading a function, overloading an operator, changing the order of types, changing the types using the same name for the member in context. 
Example:
Public Class Calc
{
public void fnMultiply(int x, int y)
{ return x * y; }
public void fnMultiply(int x, int y, int z)
{ return x * y * z; }
}
...
...
Calc obj;
int Result;
Result = obj.fnMultiply(2,3,4); // The second fnMultiply would be called
Result = obj.fnMultiply(3,4); // The first fnMultiply would be called
//Here, the call depends on the number of parameters passed, polymorphism is achieved using overloading 

Question: What is Overloading? What is Overloads? What is Overload? 
Answer: Overloading - is the concept of using one function or class in different ways by changing the signature of its parameters. We can define a function with multiple signatures without using the keyword Overloads, but if you use the Overloads keyword in one, you must use it in all of the function's Overloaded signatures. 
The Overloads keyword is used in VB.NET, while the Overload keyword is used in C# (There is no other difference). The Overloads property allows a function to be described using deferent combinations of parameters. Each combination is considered a signature, thereby uniquely defining an instance of the method being defined. 
Overloading is a way through which polymorphism is achieved.

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