As mentioned in a previous blog entry, Microsoft seems to be very discrete about their interest in AOP, if ever such an interest should exist. I was recently browsing on the weblog of Eric Gunnerson, Program Manager on the C# team at Microsoft Corp. and saw that he attended the JavaOne conference (+ here), following the "Know your enemy" principle. Eric writes:

Prior to the conference, he answered in one of his recent blog entries an apparently often asked question about whether the C# team had any plans for supporting AOP any time soon. The current "official" answer is NO. Eric says that they have not yet identified scenarios that would justify such an addition to the language. On the following day, he blogged again asking people for examples of scenarios where AOP would make sense. Eric got plenty of constructive comments, such as Apolon Ivankovic making up a tentative example of how AOP-fied C# would look like, and Sebastian Lambla, aka 'The Technologist', providing some interesting views on the subject.

This kinda provides an answer to my previous question and somehow shows that Microsoft people are definitely somewhere in the arena watching industry and academic actors evolve on the AOP scene. Yet, one might wonder whether this predator behavior is deliberate or not...