Microsoft Small Basic

A simplified programming language and environment to help teach programming to beginners.

Microsoft Small Basic is a project that is aimed at making computer programming accessible to beginners. The project comprises a simple programming language that gathers inspiration from the original BASIC programming language; a modern and attractive programming environment; and rich, extensible libraries. Together they make programming fun for kids and adults alike.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B006D58D-C2C7-44AD-936B-E7E2D7DE793E&displaylang=en

Axum Published! Tutorial: Building your first Axum application

Not familiar with Axum? Here's a C9 interview with the Axum team to refresh your memory (it's a domain specific language for concurrent programming, formerly known as "Maestro", developed by the Parallel Computing Platform team).

Here, Axum PM Josh Phillips walks us through building a simple Axum application in just over 5 minutes. Josh builds a simple “math library” on agents and shows how easy it is with Axum to focus on your code and get parallelism and safety implicitly.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Building-your-first-Axum-application/

Maestro: A Managed Domain Specific Language For Concurrent Programming

Josh Phillips(PM), Niklas Gustafsson(Architect), and Artur Laksberg(Developer) of the Parallel Computing Platform Team spend some time with me to discuss a managed (.NET-based) DSL (Domain Specific Language) for concurrent programming, Maestro. Maestro incorporates well-entrenched language patterns (imperative, OO, C style syntax, etc) and language constructs (channels, agents, domains) in a compelling way to make concurrent composition more accessible and familiar to the legions of sequential code composers.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Maestro-A-Managed-Domain-Specific-Language-For-Concurrent-Programming/