Even your [insert relative] can program with Microsoft Boku

committed to database on October 29, 2008 at 2:15 pm Eastern Standard Time 8 comments digg this

Update: Boku, or whatever they decide to call it later, will be available March of ‘09.

After suffering this morning through the monotonous Microsoft Research history segment of the keynote, a team member unveiled a new “visual programming language made specifically for creating games”. Being a developer, I fell in love with it almost instantly. You can drool over the additional photos and information by visiting the MSR page.


Programming UI Screenshot – Microsoft Research

  1. wisher October 29, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    Seems cool! Maybe it is not as powerful as .Net, but I think that for a silly facebook-style game is all we need :-D

  2. Christian October 29, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    Hmm … seems like an easy version of visual basic … not as powerful but probably potential … who are they targeting though? 13 year olds?

  3. Daniel November 4, 2008 at 10:24 am

    If you read the post Christian you will see that, yes, 13 year olds are the market.

  4. iambald November 4, 2008 at 9:08 pm

    They’re insulting the 13 year olds…
    I’m 13 and I know some C and Java

  5. Avatar November 5, 2008 at 4:03 am

    then there is also the Smallbasic project:
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

  6. Calvin November 7, 2008 at 12:21 pm

    @iamblad: Maybe 10 year olds?

  7. Zachary November 15, 2008 at 10:44 pm

    I’m 12 and I program in C++ and Assembler. But I guess some will need Boku, because people generally don’t consider me average. VB never sparked any interest in me. Now writing an OS is cool. Currently developing a shell/terminal for it.

  8. Zachary November 15, 2008 at 10:51 pm

    @iambald: I see where you’re coming from. Send a mail here (anonymous inbox) and we can probably work on a more reliable OS than Lunix and Binbows: h4xx0r.666 (at) gmail (dot) com