Nikolay Kostov's Blog

Last night was the first day of Microsoft's Build conference, which runs from 13 to 16 September. This is the conference that software engineers and companies working with Microsoft technologies had been waiting for like manna from heaven. The "big picture" of the future of Windows became clear on the very first night: a developer preview of Windows 8 was released, the future of XAML was settled, and interesting things such as native JavaScript, picture passwords and WinRT were announced. Another important point is that the Metro design from Windows Phone will be central to Windows 8.

A few months ago I had to write a program that takes an arithmetic expression as plain text and returns its result. Good programmers would reach for algorithms such as shunting-yard and reverse Polish notation. I decided to solve it my own way instead: compile the expression at run time with CSharpCodeProvider and let the .NET CLR's own expression evaluator do the work. No stacks, no operator precedence, no parse trees - just plain C# compilation and a bit of reflection.

Today I decided to find out which are the most common Bulgarian words in the Bulgarian Wikipedia - and I found out. I parsed the full Wikipedia XML dump with C# and counted every word: 220,681 articles, 46,707,608 words, 714,876 of them distinct. The post has the letter frequencies, the top 100 and top 550 words, the source code, and a download with every word and its count.

If you have ever worked with exploits (exploits), you cannot have missed the site http://1337day.com. It collects over 16,700 exploits going back to 1996. Because the site had (and still has) plenty of trouble with the law, the domains they buy keep getting shut down. For a long time the site was at inj3ct0r.com, later it would only open by IP (77.120.101.55), and for a while it was gone altogether. For exactly those reasons I decided to collect all the exploits from the site and share them here as text files. Another reason is that searching the MySQL table, which I have also uploaded here, is far more convenient and easy.

At last, after long months of hard work, the book is ready - the one that will help thousands of beginner programmers learn the basics of programming, data structures and even algorithms. If you have the desire and the will to become a good programmer but lack the experience, this is exactly the book for you. All the examples and exercises are built around C# and the .NET platform. It is distributed completely free of charge in HTML, PDF and DOC, and I am one of its authors - my chapter is "Lambda Expressions and LINQ Queries". The book is written in Bulgarian.