Learn How to Program with Small Basic
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.
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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!
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About Beth Massi
Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.
