Getting Started With Microsoft Small Basic For Beginners

Microsoft always makes the programming environment better and easy. Now, there is a new addition for programming learners that is called Small Basic. Small Basic is for any beginner who wants to learn to program. The new Small Basic IDE is similar to MS Paint, which makes programmers work and enjoys learning. I still remember my school days when I was in high school. During our computer class, the teacher used to ask to start with MS Paint. By using MS paint, we started learning how to use a mouse, etc. Now, I can say instead of teaching MS Paint to any new user we can ask them to Start with Small Basic, Yes, Small Basic will be easy for any new person who is working on the computer for the first time or who don’t know any programming language and want to start learning to program. For any person who wants to start learning programs, the good time is to start with Small Basic instead of starting from C, C#, VB.NET, or C++. Many people who start learning any language like C, C++, C# and etc, found it hard to understand all the basics. Without understanding the basics it will be hard for them to write a good program. Now no need to worry about that, since Small Basic is here for all of them. I can strongly say that if anyone wants to start learning to program for the first time they should start with Small Basic. They will surely easily understand what is IDE and Editor and how to run a program, how to write their own logic of the program within a couple of days. Later, they can easily learn any language they wish for like C++, C#, etc. Why do I recommend Small Basic for Beginners who want to learn Programming?

How to install Small Basic

You can download the Small Basic from the following link:

• Microsoft Small Basic 1.2

Here is a TechNet Wiki Article which has all the links to start learning Small Basic.

• Wiki: Small Basic Portal

Installation Steps

After downloading Small basic from the above link install it on your computer. Click Next and Install Microsoft Small Basic. Finally, click on Install Button which will install the Small Basic on your computer. After installation, you can find the Small Basic Icon, Click and open Microsoft Small Basic. When we open Small Basic for the first time we can see the Development Environment with the following 3 parts:

Our First Small Basic Program (For Output) Let’s create a simple program to display our Name as output. It will be always fun to see our name to be displayed in our first program. I still remember my high school days as I was so happy to see my name to be displayed from C Language using printf(). Now let’s see how to write our first program to display our Name from Small Basic. The Output is to display any text or value from our program. As we all know, Program is nothing but a set of instructions. Using one of the Instructions we can display our output. To display the Output from Small Basic we will be using the following, TextWindow.WriteLine(“your output text”); As I have told Small Basic Development Environment is much easier for any new developer who learns to program for the first time. When you type text in the editor, you can see a small window that will display all the text starting from the text (These are all the instructions to perform our programming result). Here, we are using TextWindow.WriteLine(); to display out first output. To display the output we use the WritLine() and to read the Input from the user we will use the Read(). Here WriteLine() and Read() are called as a function, which means these two Read() and WritelLine() will have some set of Instruction which will execute our text and display or get the text from users. Now let’s display our Name. TextWindow.WriteLine("My Name is SHANU.Welcome to My first Program"). You can copy this code and paste it into your Small Basic Editor. Note “SHANU” is my name, so you have to change it to your name. Yes, now we have written our first program to display our name so what is next. Now we need to run the program and view our Output. To run the program we can press F5 from the keyboard or we can click on the Run from the Tool Window. So here is our first program output. I can feel how much you are happy while seeing your successful message. To close the output window you can press any key. Here all the output is based on Console so in the next tutorial we will see about graphical window output. Save the Program You have successfully created your first program. Now you need to save the program so that you can use it later and also you can modify the same program with more functionality. To save the program from Toolbar you can see the Save Icon click on that and save the program to your selected folder for easy access. The program will be saved as a “.sb” extension. If we run our program we can see it in the same folder with a few more files like “.dll” and “.exe” extension files. We can also run directly by clicking the “.exe” file. Here “.exe” is an executable file. Open the Saved Program To open the existing saved file we can click on the Open icon from the toolbar in Small Basic. Go to the path where you have saved your program. Select the “.sb” extension file and click open. Our First Small Basic Program (For Input/output using Variable) So you have successfully created your simple program to display your name as output. Now let’s see how to give input to your program and display the output of your input. So what is the use of getting Input? Now, for example, you want to write a program where others can give their name as input and you need to display the user entered Name with a welcome message. To perform this we need to store the name entered by the user temporarily on the computer. Here we use variables to store the input. The variables will reside in computer memory temporarily till we close our program. In this example program let us see how to store our name to a variable and display the output from our program.