Small Basic

Small Basic Programs in 25 lines

vijayeg — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:52:33 GMT

Note: All the programs listed below can be downloaded directly into Small Basic. Just import the programs using their published Id.

What started as a fun challenge in our Small Basic Forums, quickly turned into a repository of very interesting programs, all conforming to a 25-line limit. It is amazing to see enthusiastic participants come up with very creative patterns to embed complex logic in as few lines as possible.

The challenge started with the classic game of Rock/Paper/Scissors, written in 24 lines by Coding Cat and published as CTB433. This was meant to be just an example for the challenge, but within days, Jason Jacques posted a 9 line version of the same program, published as CTB433-1. And the race was on.

Recently Rushworks posted a trick to initialize Small Basic arrays in a single line. Hours later, Davey-Wavey came up with a feature-par version of the original Rock/Paper/Scissors in 3 lines flat! This version is published as CTB433-2.

And using a few tricks and assumptions about the size of the text window, Jason came back and posted the same program in just 2 lines! It is published as CTB433-5.

As this race was going on, litdev published the Swarm of Bees as MSH031 in 25 lines.

Simultaneously, Dudeson published a similar program, RRS083 which simulates an atom with the mouse center as the nucleus. And Grzegorz Tworek, published his Lissajou’s Curve simulator program as GQP876, in 11 lines.

Dudeson went back and improved his atom code to publish RPW587, which runs much faster.

Other programs that you’ll find on this forum:

Sudoku Solver

(25 lines)
by Jason Jacques: CGW786

Sub Hunt

(25 lines)
by Coding Cat: KDN168
also by Davey-Wavey: KDN168-0

Space Invaders

(20 lines)
by Davey-Wavey: XDK444

Graduating from Small Basic

vijayeg — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:38:00 GMT

You probably have heard of the "Graduate" feature introduced with the Small Basic v0.7. If you haven't - you should check it out - it allows you to convert any Small Basic program into an equivalent Visual Basic program, allowing you to gently ramp up to the full power of a professional programming language.

Here's how it works. You start with a program you wrote or opened or imported. In this case, let's import "TETRIS" from the web.

When run, this should pop-up a fully playable Tetris game.

When we hit the "Graduate" button on the toolbar, we are presented with this friendly wizard which asks for the location to put the converted Visual Basic project.

Once we pick a location and hit Continue, we should see Visual Basic should launch with the Tetris program.

If you don't have Visual Basic installed on your machine, you would see this page on the wizard:

The link (http://microsoft.com/express/vb) allows you to download a free version of Visual Basic that is compatible with Small Basic.

Happy Birthday Small Basic

vijayeg — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:54:00 GMT

Marking the first year anniversary since it went public, we're announcing the 7th release of Small Basic CTP. This release adds localized support to four new languages, extending Small Basic's reach to Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Turkish!

In addition, this release sports a cool new feature called "Graduate", that allows you to port your Small Basic program seamlessly to Visual Basic.

Download v0.7 here

In addition, this version also comes with the following much requested features and bug-fixes:

A helpful crash reporting dialog that pops-up whenever your program crashes
Fixes to Scrollbar size to make it easier to find in huge documents
Fixed crash when a specified image cannot be loaded
Fix for foreign keyboards not being able to use AltGr
Opacity and Visibility properties for Shapes
Make comments and objects more differentiated in syntax color

Sample of the Week - SOko

vijayeg — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:45:00 GMT

This week's Small Basic sample of the week comes from kts99 who has written this beautiful game, SOko Cute. This is one of the first samples that make great use of the Shapes.Rotate and Shapes.Zoom APIs. You can check out this game in Small Basic by importing program id: SOKO.

Program listing can be found at: http://smallbasic.com/program/?SOKO

You can download Small Basic for free at http://smallbasic.com/, to try this sample and more.

Collision Physics With Small Basic

vijayeg — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:53:00 GMT

LitDev is an expert in real-world physics programming, and he frequents the Small Basic forums providing answers to people's queries. One of his sample programs, the collision box, best demonstrates the expertise of LitDev and capabilities of Small Basic.

This program can be directly imported into Small Basic by using the ID: PMT149

The program provides all the interesting knobs and you can even click on the balls to stop them.

Now available: Small Basic v0.6

vijayeg — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:26:00 GMT

We have a new version of Small Basic for download at http://smallbasic.com. This release adds German localization on top of existing French, Spanish and Russian.

Also, this release sports a lot of small bug-fixes and some most requested features:

Updated the manual to include a chapter on Arrays
Added Zoom capabilities to Shape
Added Arc Trigonometric operations in the Math object
Removed Arguments object and moved the functionality into Program object
GetAllIndices operation on Array allows iteration on top of all array values
Added ElapsedMilliseconds to help measure time
Added TextInput events, to help write text input features on GraphicsWindow
Fixed crashes related to event subscription
Fixed cursor visibility issues

When you have downloaded and installed, import STARGATES and try out the fun game.

"Introducing Small Basic" manual available in German

vijayeg — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:20:00 GMT

Download from: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/2/1/921D10C7-75C0-4395-93AF-49A830F4780E/Small Basic Einfuehrung.pdf

Star Gates: Sample of the Week

vijayeg — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:48:00 GMT

This week's sample is an adventure in Space - a game called Star Gates, developed by BigDaddyo. This exciting and fun game takes game programming in Small Basic to the next level - with amazing sound and graphics effects. You can find the program listing at: http://smallbasic.com/program/?STARGATES. You can also download this program directly into Small Basic by using the Import ID: STARGATES.

Download Small Basic: http://smallbasic.com

Sample of the week: Gorillas

vijayeg — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:50:00 GMT

About 20 years ago, Microsoft released MS-DOS 5, and with it shipped a programming language called QBASIC. One of the samples that came with QBASIC is GORILLAS.BAS. The game used real-world Physics to make players hit each other with... wait for it... bananas. Come on, what did you expect from a game where the players are gorillas.

Fast forward to now. Rushworks has successfully captured the nostalgia with Gorillas for Small Basic. You can download and play the game by using the ID: NLQ667-2. The program listing is also available at: http://smallbasic.com/program/?NLQ667-2

Check out this forum thread for more discussion on this game.

Small Basic, now in Russian

vijayeg — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:22:00 GMT

The Russian localized version of Small Basic went live today, as v0.5.1. No other change has been made and all the remaining functionality is the same as v0.5 (including English, French and Spanish). So, if you want Russian, go ahead and download Small Basic from the same location (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx). As always, please refresh your browser, and clean up the cache if need be to get the new version.

If you're running English version of the Operating System, you can run:

%programfiles%\microsoft\small basic\sb.exe /l:ru-ru

to launch the Russian localized version.

Running localized versions of Small Basic

vijayeg — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:26:00 GMT

Have an English Operating System, but want to run the Spanish version of Small Basic? Yes, you can do that with your current installation - and you don't even have to install anything extra.

In your Start Menu (or in your Run prompt), type

%programfiles%\microsoft\small basic\sb.exe /l:es-es

and hit Enter. This will launch the Spanish version of Small Basic.

%programfiles%\microsoft\small basic\sb.exe /l:fr-fr

will launch the French version of Small Basic.

As of v0.5, we support only those two languages, but expect more languages support soon.

Color Picker

vijayeg — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:43:00 GMT

Color Picker by Suduadib is an example that shows the usage of arrays in Small Basic. You can import this program using the id: SGS247.

Program listing is available at: http://program.smallbasic.com/?SGS247

API Reference

vijayeg — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:07:00 GMT

The Small Basic API reference is now available at: http://doc.smallbasic.com/. With v0.5, you can view the API reference in your choice of English, Spanish or French.

Arrays in Small Basic

vijayeg — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:04:00 GMT

With version 0.5, Small Basic implements native support for arrays. This is a significant change from how arrays were used in v0.4 and so I want to write about the syntax and the functionality of the new arrays.

Any variable can be used as an array – no special declaration or setup is necessary. Arrays are indexed using square brackets.

numbers[1] = "One"
numbers[2] = "Two"
TextWindow.WriteLine(numbers[1])
TextWindow.WriteLine(numbers[2]) 

Arrays can be indexed with either numbers or text. And you can use different types of indexers in the same array.

myarray["one"] = 1
myarray[2300] = "Two thousand three hundred"
myarray["name"] = "Vijaye" 

Arrays can be copied over via simple assignment. Modifying one array doesn’t affect the other array.

first[1] = "Uno"
first[2] = "Dos"
second = first
TextWindow.WriteLine(second[2]) ' prints Dos
second[1] = "One"
TextWindow.WriteLine(second[1]) ' prints One
TextWindow.WriteLine(first[1]) ' prints Uno 

The values in an array are internally maintained as a string with semicolon separated values:

person["Name"] = "Vijaye"
person["Age"] = 30
person["Address"] = "Redmond"
TextWindow.WriteLine(person) 

This prints:

Name=Vijaye;Age=30;Address=Redmond; 

You can remove elements in an array by setting them to an empty text.

myarray[1] = "One"
myarray[2] = "Two"
myarray[3] = "Three"
TextWindow.WriteLine(Array.GetItemCount(myarray)) ' prints 3
myarray[2] = ""
TextWindow.WriteLine(Array.GetItemCount(myarray)) ' prints 2 

And finally, arrays can be multi-dimensional too

people[1]["Name"]["First"] = "Vijaye"
people[1]["Name"]["Last"] = "Raji"
people[2]["Name"]["First"] = "Carl"
people[2]["Name"]["Last"] = "Fredrickson"
TextWindow.WriteLine(people[2]["Name"]) 

This prints:

First=Carl;Last=Fredrickson;

Theoretically, you can have as many dimensions as you want. However, the way they are implemented internally, a two dimensional array is 2 times slower than a single dimension array, and a three dimensional array is 4 times slower than a single dimensional array and so on. So, I’d recommend not overdoing multidimensional arrays.

Spanish Documentation now live

vijayeg — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:35:00 GMT

You can now download the Spanish version of "Introduction to programming" guide from: http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/E/6/CE66B602-19F7-4FA6-A4D2-E06F8382A7B9/Introduccion a Small Basic.pdf

Diviértete.