I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Apr 2009
Interview
They treat their interviewees very well. They will put in a nice hotel, give you a rental, and pay your expenses for you to spend an extra day and night in the area to get to know it and explore and have fun. The interview itself lasts a fair part of the day and involves talking to several engineers. The questions are pretty standard algorithms and problem solving questions. Almost all of them asked me to write code. Even lunch was an interview with the topic about facing difficulties/working in teams/interacting with others and so on.
I was very impressed with the work, offer, and suggested flexibility.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How to write an evaluator for a string like "(1+3 * ( 5 / 4)) and get a numeric result.
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Oct 2008
Interview
I applied through on campus Job Fair. Microsoft contacted me online asking for an on-site interview. The interview itself took about 30 minutes. Questions were more about to see your problem solving skills and analytic approach than technical skills. Interviewer was a project manager. At the end of the interview, it took three weeks to be notified that there won't be any offer. Interviewer was nice and polite. He knew the stuff.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
How many unique paths are there from B-L point to the T-R point of a chess table? What would be your approach to calculate this?