Microsoft made available for download the latest installment of Small Basic in early February 2010, and version 0.8 of the programming language continues to be available at this point in time. The eighth Community Technology Preview of Small Basic enables beginner developers to build simple applications not only for the desktop, but also for the Cloud. Essentially, devs can publish their programs or games to a Silverlight hosted service, which allows users to access content in their browsers, as long as they have Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash installed.

“Did you know that with Small Basic v0.8, you can write a program or a game and have it run identically on both your desktop and the browser? This makes it super easy to share your games with your friends (even those that may be running a Mac),” a member of the Small Basic team revealed.

“In fact it is so easy that you can have your program deployed, hosted and running on a browser with just one click of a button! So easy that it might actually be the fastest and friction free authoring environment for Silverlight.”

It is important to underline that Small Basic is a very simple development environment aimed at beginners. The main advantage is the fact that, being based on .NET, it will allow devs to develop a range of programming concepts that they will be able to subsequently apply when using Visual Basic, for example.

“When you are ready to share this program with the world, you simply hit the ‘Publish’ button and voila the program is deployed to a Silverlight hosted website,” the Small basic team representative added. “Not only can you see your program run on this website, you can also host it on your own website or blog.”

Small Basic is available for download here.