Nikolay Kostov's Blog

Sometimes, when building web applications (and not only then), you need to maintain a list of all the languages in the world (or at least the more common ones). Up-to-date lists of the world’s languages are maintained at this link. The format is a little awkward, so I decided to parse it into CLR objects with C#, from where they can easily be loaded into all sorts of other formats (into SQL Server, for example). Below you will find a list of the languages (both the more common ones and a full list of all human languages). I have also added C# code that downloads the list of all languages and then prints the names of the living languages to the console.

In this blog post for beginner programmers I have collected a few very important pieces of advice on naming variables, data types, methods and more in C#. Each piece of advice comes with several examples of correct and incorrect naming - PascalCasing and camelCasing, abbreviations, reserved words, interfaces and properties. Good luck!

Identifying the language of a piece of text is a broad topic. Rather than going into the algorithms, this post looks at four methods you can use off the shelf to detect the language of a text from .NET: the Windows Extended Linguistic Services API, AlchemyAPI, the Google Translate API and the open-source NTextCat. Here is what each of them got right, what they got wrong, and which one I ended up choosing.

The biggest obstacle for anyone looking for a job is the job interview itself. Most people manage to find a suitable position and to prepare their documents, CV and cover letter, but when it comes to the interview, few of them do well. In this talk I cover what a job interview is, how to prepare for one, what questions get asked and which mistakes are the most common. Recorded during the "Working in the IT Industry" seminar. The video is in Bulgarian.

On 4 December 2011, from 10:30 to 16:30, the largest online algorithmic programming contest ever held in Bulgaria took place. 216 people took part. The contest was part of the preparation for the first exam at theTelerik Software Academyand for that reason the competitors were mostly students from the Telerik Academy. They had six hours to solve five programming problems from the first six topics of the "Programming Fundamentals with C#" course at the Telerik Academy. The contest was held online onthe new BGCoder.com judge systemand the participants were allowed to use only C#. Anyone can try the problems by registering in the system and practising the contest online. Here you can find the problem statements together with their solutions. The solutions were written by the authors of the problems and use only the topics the students had covered (data types, operators, expressions, working with the console, conditional statements and loops).