The Same Old Brand New Danny

Danny Thorpe left Microsoft (Windows Live Team) last month and joined CoolIris, the company who gives birth to PicLens.

He is still monitoring Borland/CodeGear newsgroup, so this week I finally knew how class helper is created by reading these words he wrote.

Troy Wolbrink wrote:

> BTW: who came up with

> the class helper idea and/or its application to Variant in Delphi. NET?

>

Chuck Jazdzewski hatched the original idea behind class helpers. I helped make the magic work. Chuck really blew the doors off convention when he realized that it was also possible to implement true polymorphism with virtual methods in class helpers, with some additional compiler work and critical simplifying assumptions. Microsoft’s C# extension methods serve a purpose similar to Delphi class helpers, but C# extension methods don’t venture into virtual methods.

As for using class helpers to implement Variants, I think that one was my fault. I definitely remember the giddy headrush when the idea hit, and didn’t fall apart. Chuck just laughed when I pitched it to him.

I’m sure Seppy was convinced he finally had proof of my insanity. (and he did) Seppy helped out a lot with finishing out the .NET RTL, so I’m pretty sure he had a hand in the variants implementation. He will deny it, of course, if he has any sense at all. :>

-Danny

p.s. You’re Welcome. ;>

– The Architect of Disruption: http://www.dannythorpe.com Discover More with CoolIris: http://www.cooliris.com

It seems that Danny is quite satisfied with this new job, so let’s see what would come from CoolIris in the future.

Good luck, Danny.