Anders Hejlsberg

Applets are fantastic.

And write ones run everywhere.

Yep, yep.

Which run in the browser and everywhere, supposedly.

And this language that was, like, simple, yet had object orientation and byte codes and, like, was platform independent.

And, I mean, it was, like...

Everyone was running around with their heads cut off, thinking this was the end of languages.

You know, Java is going to flatten the universe.

And then we're all just going to be writing Java and Java applets.

And that's it.

You know, and I actually came to Microsoft ostensibly to be the architect of Microsoft's Java development tool.

And worked on Visual J++ 6.0 was the version that... They had Visual J++ 1.1 at the time I joined, which was basically take Visual C++, yank out the C++ compilers, dig in a Java compiler and call it good.

But it wasn't interactive.

It wasn't rapid application development and whatever.

And I came sort of with a whole host of knowledge of how to build interactive development tool.

And that's what we set out to do with Visual J++ 6.0.

And we also, of course, knew that, hey, you know, I mean, people are going to be running on Windows and they're going to want to be able to build Windows desktop apps.

And so we built a class library that allowed you to do that.

This was WFC, I think it was called, but it was the precursor of WinForms, you know, in some ways.

Well, you know, development of J++ went great until the big Sun Microsoft lawsuit got in the way.