I've been so busy writing for my book recently that I've not been blogging as I should. Oh, well. But I stumbled on a great little programming language called Microsoft Small Basic today that I thought I should share with you. It comes from the Microsoft DevLabs. You can learn more about Small Basic here. Essentially, Small Basic is a BASIC-like development tool aimed at beginners. It has primitives for reading and writing to a text-based console window and it can do graphics manipulation, too. It's really fun. I can't wait to turn my kids onto it. They'll be cranking out fun Small Basic programs and e-mailing them to me soon, I hope. I've wanted to find a way to get my younger children interested in what I do for a living but I just couldn't find anything that was simple and fun with enough power to do impressive stuff. I think Small Basic might be exactly what I was looking for. It requires the .NET Framework 3.5 and installs in about one minute. Be sure to download the Introducing Small Basic Guide, too. Lots of great examples in there. And the Intellisense feature in this environment is very cool. My kids are going to be spoiled! Here are a couple of screen shots. Enjoy.

Update: if you use low-privilege login accounts for your kids on a shared PC, be sure to put the MSI installer package in a shared location before running it as an administrator. When your kids log in with their reduced privileges and try to run Small Basic, they will need access to the installer package from that shared location. Don't delete it.

The Small Basic Development Environment

Running the Program