Anders Hejlsberg

Anders Hejlsberg is a Dane who studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. In 1980 he 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 Compass Pascal and later as Poly Pascal. After being sold to Borland it was marketed as the Turbo Pascal compiler.

As part of the deal Anders 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.

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

He received the 2000 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award for his work on Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.