How to find the longest continuous increasing sequence

How to find the longest continuous increasing sequence in a array of numbers is one of the questions I was asked in a interview at Microsoft, Copenhagen. The solution I provided then was not the best one, since I wasn't so well prepared (I gave a O(n*log₂n) solution which is better than the basic O(n²) solution, but still not the optimum one). This can be done with O(n) time complexity. Hopefully writing these things here will help me in my future interviews.

The idea for the O(n) solution is to keep track of the start of the longest continuous increasing sequence and it's length. At each item, if it's bigger than the previous, then we have a sequence. If it's longer then the current maximum length, then we have a new longest increasing sequence, longer than the previous one.

The same principle can be applied to similar problem which I'll post later. Until then, here's the algorithm:

   1:  void longestContinuousIncrSeq(int* a, int size) {

   2:      int maxstart = 0;

   3:      int max = 1;

   4:      int start = 0;

   5:      for (int i = 1; i < size; i++) {

   6:          if (a[i] > a[i - 1]) {

   7:              if (i - start + 1 > max) {

   8:                  max = i - start + 1;

   9:                  maxstart = start;

  10:              }

  11:          } else {

  12:              start = i;

  13:          }

  14:      }

  15:      cout << "Longest sequence starts at " << maxstart << " and is " << max << " numbers long." << endl;

  16:      for (int i = 0; i < max; i++) {

  17:          cout << a[maxstart + i] << " ";

  18:      }

  19:      cout << endl;

  20:  }