Danny Thorpe

Danny Thorpe is a software developer currently working on cloud computing developer tools at Microsoft.

He was the Chief Scientist for Windows and .NET developer tools at Borland Corporation starting from January 2004 until October 2005, as well as Chief Architect of the Delphi programming language from 2000 to 2005. He joined Borland in 1990 as an associate QA engineer working on Turbo Pascal 6.0. He was a member of the team that created the Delphi programming language, Visual Component Library (VCL), and IDE, released in 1995. In 1999, he was a founding member of the Kylix team, implementing the Delphi compiler and development environment on Linux, released in 2001. After the release of Kylix, he was the founder and lead programmer for Borland's Delphi .NET effort, porting and extending the Delphi language to the Microsoft .NET platform.

In 1994 while at Borland, he contracted with Santa Cruz startup Cinematronics (David Stafford and Mike Sandige) to build a component model and collision physics engine for a software pinball game. Cinematronics licensed an early version of the pinball engine to Microsoft for the Windows 95 Plus! Pack's "Space Cadet" pinball game. Cinematronics was later acquired by Maxis, who published Full Tilt! Pinball in 1996 and a sequel in 1998.

He joined Google in October 2005 and was a founding member of the Google Gears team, responsible for designing the client side browser local storage subsystem and JavaScript interface bindings.

He joined Microsoft's Windows Live Platform team in April 2006 as a Principal Software Development Engineer. His primary focus at Microsoft was the development of a secure client-side cross-domain scripting library for browser web apps, as well as the Windows Live Contacts Control built upon that library.

In October 2007, he joined startup Cooliris to work on the PicLens browser plugin for 3D visualization of web content.

In June 2008, he returned to Microsoft to work in a newly formed Cloud Computing Tools incubation team creating Visual Studio extensions to support development of applications for Microsoft's Windows Azure hosted services environment and Live Mesh / Live Framework client-side and offline web application environment.

He lives in the Santa Cruz mountains near Ben Lomond, California.