Im a real noob at programming but I made this program (in visual basic) that is about 2 mb in exe nothing serious and wanted to know if it was possible to get it running on the n800? Maybe convert it to a format the n800 could run? Im 100% positive it could handle it. Doubt its possible but i guess it wouldnt hurt to ask....

If you created that program under Windows it won't run on the N800. To develop for the N800 you need the SDK (software developer kit) to develop in C. You can find more about that if you look around on maemo.org. The kit runs under Linux though (although there is a WMWARE developer image around that can be used with Windows I think). And/or you can write your application in Python, which has a gtk (ui) binding so that you can write graphical apps. For that you can probably do without the SDK (I haven't written any Python myself).

<Obligatory derisive VBA comment>

The main raison d'etre for VBA is integration with the microsoft apps and framework. The nokia tablets are thankfully free of that grot.

One alternative to developing native hildon apps is to develop in python. Python apps are interpreted, so you don't need to cross-compile them to run on a particular architecture.

Closest to Windows compatibility is Mono. As Visual Basic is slowly dying replaced by C# and .NET the compatibility is better. Mono actualy runs on Nokia tablets and it is not *that* slow. It is almost usable and will become better (similar to python). I would say 'perfectly usable' but when any simple program starts 3-5 seconds I can't call it usable. But that's just me

http://www.mono-project.com/Maemo (site currently down for me)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

i think mono can do VB.net so it may be possible

VB is not slowly dying, fanoush. As a 20+ year developer using it I can assure you of that. It's doing very well in fact.

In fact, .NET itself does not replace VB-- rather, new versions of VB now develop within the .NET framework rather than COM.

By Visual Basic I mean the non-.NET version - 6.0. I know it won't die easily, I've written some crappy SW in it too :-) VB for .NET is different (and incompatible on source level) beast.

Understood. I didn't get that distinction from your post, but I can see how you could have intended it. I thought you meant VB in general. And after I got over the .NET hump, I don't mind the COM version dying-- I like the new edition!

Yes, while Microsoft talked about compatibility between 'normal' Visual Basic and VB for .NET I think it is so different that it is different language. Porting any non-trivial VB 6.0 code to VB for .NET is lot of effort. I think they just added VB-like syntactic sugar to .NET so they could persuade VB developers to switch to .NET easier (for new projects). Underneath is is same bytecode as produced by C# so it doesn't matter which syntax one prefers - BASIC like (VB) or Java-like (C#).