Microsoft Small Basic

Microsoft Small Basic is a programming language, interpreter and associated IDE. Microsoft's simplified variant of BASIC, it is designed to help students who have learnt visual programming languages such as Scratch learn text-based programming. The associated IDE provides a simplified programming environment with functionality such as syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, and in-editor documentation access. The language has only 14 keywords.

Microsoft announced Small Basic in October 2008, and released the first stable version for distribution on July 12, 2011, on a Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) website, together with a teaching curriculum and an introductory guide. Between announcement and stable release, a number of Community Technology Preview (CTP) releases were made.

On March 27, 2015, Microsoft released Small Basic version 1.1, which fixed a bug and upgraded the targeted .NET Framework version from version 3.5 to version 4.5, making it the first version incompatible with Windows XP.

Microsoft released Small Basic version 1.2 on October 1, 2015. Version 1.2 was the first update after a four-year hiatus to introduce new features to Small Basic. The update added classes for working with Microsoft's Kinect motion sensors, increased the number of languages supported by the included Dictionary object, and fixed a number of bugs.

On February 19, 2019, Microsoft announced Small Basic Online (SBO). It is open source software released under MIT License on GitHub.

In Small Basic, one writes the illustrative "Hello, World!" program as follows:

Microsoft Small Basic is Turing complete. It supports conditional branching, loop structures, and subroutines for event handling. Variables are weakly typed and dynamic with no scoping rules.

The following example demonstrates conditional branching. It ask the user for Celsius or Fahrenheit and then comments on the answer in the appropriate temperature unit.