I am looking to do some programming on some PIC MCUs in the near future. I have two boards sitting around my office. One take a 9 pin serial and the other takes a USB. I am really not a Assembly or C developer and I am resistant to go down that path unless I am really in love with the platform.

A friend at work owns and recommends the Mikro line. I am in interested in Mikro and
Proton and think that Great Cow might be interesting just to see what it looks like.

Mikro Basic

http://www.mikroe.com/en/compilers/mikrobasic/pro/pic/

Proton PICBasic

http://www.picbasic.org/proton_development_suite.php

Great Cow Basic

http://gcbasic.sourceforge.net/index.html

PICBasic

http://www.melabs.com/products/pbc.htm

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Here are some other links and notes that I dug up a couple of weeks ago:

Looks nice.. but it appears that new development is slowing down on this package

http://www.basicmicro.com/MBasic--PICmicro_c_49.html

Instruction manual:

http://www.basicmicro.com/downloads/docs/mbasic.pdf

BASIC example of writing to an LCD:

http://www.basicmicro.com/downloads/code/lcdwrite.bas

Might be work a look:

http://www.picbasic.org/

Tool Comparison:

http://www.picbasic.org/compiler_comparisons.php

Some people use this for a 18 series PIC.

http://www.sfcompiler.co.uk/swordfish/index.html

Another Basic tool:

http://melabs.com/products/index.htm

Basic compiler and simulator:

http://www.oshonsoft.com/pic.html