Microscopic properties of black holes in string theory

We review the status of microscopic counting of black hole degrees of freedom. We present complementary approaches which utilize the near-horizon geometry and precisely reproduce the Bekenstein Hawking entropy for near-extreme rotating black holes in D=4 and D=5. One relies on the correspondence between the near-horizon geometry and the conformal field theory on its boundary (AdS/CFT correspondence) and another one employs the conformal sigma-model in the Neveu-Schwarz-Neveu-Schwarz sector and accounts for the black hole microstates by counting the small scale oscillations of the dyonic string there.