During the last three years, many different aspect-oriented technologies (AspectJ, AspectWerkz, JBoss AOP and Co) have been developed and some of them have started gaining a broad community and industry acceptance.

While the benefits of using AO techniques in conjunction with existing paradigms, such as OO, become clear to more and more people everyday, there are still "tiny details" (code invasiveness, over-modularization, performance, security, complexity, etc) that prevent AO technologies from being fearlessly and widely deployed and used. I'm pretty confident that in the future IDEs will leverage best practices and patterns to provide developers with better support for dealing with these issues. It is pretty safe to say that the success of AOP heavily depends on outstanding tool support and is only a matter of time now.

On the other hand, there are some big actors that we haven't heard of much. While IBM has announced that they officially back AOP, that BEA supports AspectWerkz and that Sun has decided to host an AOP panel at JavaOne 04, one could wonder where Microsoft stands on the AOP scene, and if they are even interested in AOP...

If you browse a little on Microsoft's website, all you will find is a link to an old, yet interesting, article titled "AOP Enables Better Code Encapsulation and Reuse" by Dharma Shukla, Simon Fell, and Chris Sells published in the March 2002 edition of the MSDN magazine. On Microsoft Research's website, you can also dig out the Aspect.NET project, which aims at providing a AOP framework for .NET. Apart form that, not much to report under Microsoft's sun (no pun intended). However, it is no secret that Intentional Software Corp., founded by Microsoft's former Chief Architect Charles Simonyi and AspectJ's lead developer Gregor Kiczales, is "active" in the AOP arena. It might be interesting to see what comes out of that venture.

Recently, Dion Almaer published a blog entry titled Anders Hejlsberg and AOP which actually hints that Microsoft is not just "knowing" the path but might also be willing to walk it. It would be cool to see what comes out of those "discussions".