Nice program from MS for budding programmers

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

About Small Basic see all DevLabs projects...

Small Basic is a project that's aimed at bringing "fun" back to programming. By providing a small and easy to learn programming language in a friendly and inviting development environment, Small Basic makes programming a breeze. Ideal for kids and adults alike, Small Basic helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.

Small Basic derives its inspiration from the original BASIC programming language, and is based on the Microsoft .Net platform. It is really small with just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.
The Small Basic development environment is simple, yet provides powerful modern environment features like Intellisense™ and instant context sensitive help.
Small Basic allows third-party libraries to be plugged in with ease, making it possible for the community to extend the experience in fun and interesting ways.

 

So another ultra-simplified BASIC dialect. It's such a shame though that someones who wants to use it or use programs made with it must install the huge .NET framework.

 

.NET framework is de facto included in Vista, its not bad, in fact it allows programmers and developers to write small apps as they take advantage of the installed libraries. Best part and its quite important is that it allows one app to be run in both x32 mode and x64 mode due to the Just In Time compiler, so in a x64 OS, a app will run in true x64 mode and vice versa. The only problem with .Net is high memory consumption, even though its not much considering 4GB system ram being standard now but still, the memory footprint is high.