In a recent project on top of .net we have developed a new programming language whose computing model promotes a unified view of programs as collections of self-active interoperating objects. As the compositional model of the language is based on aggregation (instead of inheritance) and on syntax-controlled dialogs (instead of method calls), it is not bound to any specific runtime system and therefore it naturally generalizes to distributed programming. In principle, the new computing model also covers logical objects of arbitrary complexity whose implementation is distributed across different machines.