Now I have to say that I am already on bad terms with the inanimate world. Even when making a cup of coffee or changing a lightbulb (or a fuse!), I think—what is it with objects? Why are they so aggressive? What’s their beef with me? Objects and I, we can’t go on like this. We must work out a compromise, a freeze, before one of us does something rash. I’ve got to meet with their people and hammer out a deal.
Martin Amis (From "Bujak and the Strong Force or God's Dice" in Einstein's Monsters).
This chapter has a vision—the whole book probably shares it. What I want to do is architect, build, and deploy systems that are essentially swarms of business objects engaging in numerous unpredictable yet effective patterns of collaboration. The value of such objects is their ability to collaborate with other business objects and components to create structures that their developers never planned for or imagined. I’m trying to build objects that can be used and assembled in unpredictable combinations. I want to build components that can dynamically discover each other’s services and behaviors at run time, and to do this I need to set up the minimum number of rules, constructs, constraints, metaphors, and prerequisites to allow for the maximum of recombinant potential. And I want to do all this with Visual Basic.
Herein lies the central paradox: rules enable you to build and assemble, but they also constrain your freedom. In this chapter, I’ll show you how you can achieve this vision of a flexible, innovative collaboration of business objects using “the rules” of Visual Basic. Indeed, Visual Basic is the infrastructure on which the vision rests.
* From “Bujak and the Strong Force or God’s Dice” in Einstein’s Monsters.