Anders Hejlsberg is an influential Danish software engineer. He co-designed several popular and commercially successful development tools.

At Borland

He studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. In 1980 Hejlsberg started writing programs for the Nascom microcomputer. In particular, he wrote a Pascal compiler. At first this was marketed as the Blue Label Pascal compiler for the Nascom-2. However he soon rewrote it for CP/M and MS-DOS and marketed it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. After being sold to Borland, it was marketed as the Turbo Pascal compiler. With Borland, it became the most commercially successful Pascal compiler ever.

As part of the deal, Hejlsberg became one of the original members of the Borland company where he remained until 1996 as Chief Engineer. During this time he developed Turbo Pascal further. Eventually he became the chief architect for the team which produced the replacement for Turbo Pascal—Delphi.

At Microsoft

In 1996 Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft where he was the man behind J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC). More recently he has led the team which has created the C# programming language.

He received the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award for his work on Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

External links

• Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg Receives Prestigious Excellence in Programming Award
• 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award

Interviews

• Interview from .NET Developer's Journal, Vol 1 issue 1.
• Interview from .NET Developer's Journal, Vol 3 issue 2.
• The C# Design Process: A Conversation with Anders Hejlsberg

Videos

• Anders Hejlsberg - Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum #