Learn How to Program with Small Basic

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Microsoft Developer Labs has released Small Basic, a simple programming language based on BASIC and a development environment that runs on Windows XP or Vista (written in WPF on the .NET Framework 3.5). There's good documentation and examples as well as a Forum to ask questions and post your cool programs.

I got so addicted to this today playing with it. Here's a simple program I wrote to grab random World Series pictures from Flickr and create a collage.

sb1'

sb2

There's no debugger support yet so if you get a runtime error it's hard to debug at the moment, but they plan on adding that soon. I think it would also be very cool to make it more interactive (ala dynamic language) so that as you typed your program actually executed line by line. I'm going to take this to my mom's elementary school when I go speak to the kids this year.

There's even a Turtle in there that you can program to draw on the screen just like LOGO. Very cool! Try this out on your kids and post your feedback to the forum.

Enjoy!