Small Basic: How to Graduate to Visual Basic

  • Article

You might have heard of the "Graduate" feature in Small Basic.  If you haven't - you should check it out - it enables you to convert any Small Basic program into an equivalent Visual Basic program, allowing you to gently ramp up to the full power of a professional programming language.

Here's how it works.  You start with a program you wrote, or opened, or imported.  In this case, let's import "TETRIS" from the web.

http://smallbasic.com/drop/graduate_post_1.png

When run, this should pop-up a fully-playable Tetris game. 

http://smallbasic.com/drop/tetris.png

When we click the "Graduate" button on the toolbar, we are presented with this friendly wizard that asks for the location to put the converted Visual Basic project.

http://smallbasic.com/drop/graduate_post_2.png

Once we pick a location and click Continue, we should see Visual Basic launch with the Tetris program.

http://smallbasic.com/drop/graduate_post_3.png

If you don't have Visual Basic installed on your machine, you would see this page on the wizard:

http://smallbasic.com/drop/graduate_post_4.png

The link (http://microsoft.com/express/vb) allows you to download a free version of Visual Basic that is compatible with Small Basic.